Stingray Incursion

This was a serious and real attempt at making a game. I wanted to build something I wanted to play.

During the hey-day of the XBox 360, when indie games were in the midst of it's first renaissance, I set about to make a game that was a mix between casual controller-based gameplay and involved systems and simulation. That game was called Stingray Incursion. You pilot a helicopter through a procedurally generated world serving as the backdrop for a fixed story pivoting around fixed set-pieces. (Bonus: it was set in the same universe as my old web comic Freight, which no longer exists).

In 2012 I was still pretty young and enthusiastic, and I felt that I'd rather embark on the challenge of dealing with the low-level stuff myself. XNA provided the necessary Direct-X interfaces in the language that I love, C#. It wouldn't be the first time that I built low-level graphics pipelines and an asset engines. At university I worked on a pool-table simulation in Visual C++ and Direct-X 7. The game quicly took shape, I put down the main control systems, the HUD, a full day and night cycle, I built rudimentary AI and a few classes of enemies and it was a blast. And then Microsoft pulled the plug on XNA and their C# support for their Direct-X suite.

I never fully recovered from the deprecation of the Game Studio SDK, and with it, the termination of my hard work of several years. I'm still immensily proud of what I had built though, but unfortunately (because of the Game Studio dependency) all I have to show for it these days is a pretty low-quality gameplay video, a few sceenshots, and a series of development blog posts.

XNA? What XNA?


Microsoft announced that ".

Michael Bay-ish



Tweaks and Highlights


My wife made a comment about how she struggles to distinguish the HUD from the background.

Scale Models


More modelled content, but not everything's to scale.



So with the submission deadline for Indie Cade coming closer, I've spent some time polishing up the game.

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