This week I did a lot of work on the shop screen getting everything to work as it should. Health and stealth upgrades now work as well as the conversions menu where you can use money to purchase upgrade materials. By far the coolest thing I did this week was getting the treasure maps to work. These are kind of like a mini-map where you can get an overview of map to plan your route or find out where the special items are in relation to your current position. The map is about a 1/3 scale of the actual map so you can see a lot more then you normally would be able to. One thing that isn't included is enemies at this point but I don't know if that's something that adding to these maps. They're more of just a reference to find hidden items and such then to see where enemies are. You access it from the start menu so it would be kind of cumbersome to open it over and over just to see where enemies are on the map.
Here's a few screenshots to show the current status of the treasure maps, everything is a work in progress at this point. It's a little hard to see at this point, the player sort of looks like an upside-down 'Y'. What do you guys think? Is it maybe a little too plain without enemies filling the map?
interesting!
It actually looks good but the problem is you don't have parallax backgrounds showing so it looks plain. Parallax backgrounds add a lot to maps.
Also you should consider using one of the many particle engines out there for XNA. Particle effects and simple and interesting things can really add to the game such as clouds, and butterflies flittering around etc..
We wanted to keep these maps clutter free and we felt that by adding them it might be hard to find the player/items that were the main reason for the maps. We also considered and tried particles at one point but we felt they didn't blend well with the art style, maybe we'll give it a second thought again.
Looks like fun, I've always been interested in working on the XNA platform.