Fighting-Style Character Select

I had been in the dark about end of last week's news about XNA being discontinued until a coworker informed me of such things today. No matter, I say, as this doesn't affect my current progress -- just because Microsoft won't release new versions of XNA doesn't mean the current version will suddenly cease to function.

In any case, here's what I managed to get done today outside of the full-time job:

Just a simple fighter-style character select

Right after hitting Start, we come to this character selection screen. There's clearly lots of room here for more characters, and I think the fleshing out of all the character tiles will have to wait until more assets are made and I have a better grasp of just how many characters I'm going to have here. But for now, lots of empty space.

As it currently stands, pressing left/right on the controller will shift to the only other existing tile:

Who is this mysterious '?' Character?

I plan on using some form of '?' tile in the end to denote characters that have yet to be unlocked, but the 'C' tile will become a portrait image. I'm also storing character name (though mystery tiles just have a '?' in place of the name) and some information text, though they aren't displayed anywhere on the screen yet. The current plan is to perhaps reveal the unlock condition for mystery characters in the information text.

Pressing 'Y' on the 360 controller will also change the color of the selected character. I'm actually going to be drawing art assets as 2 separate images -- 1 which has a static color and 1 with select pieces that will be the color selected through this Character Select screen:

White, Red, Blue, Green, or Black (Dark Gray for the time being for obvious reasons)

I have some placeholder logic for accounting for multiple players, but currently the Player One controller is the only one responsive. My first test on this page was actually to place all 4 players on the same selection square to see how that would look, though since I saw it functioning I've since just left that code commented out. Here's how it looks with 2 players:

Multiple players will be able to choose the same character in the end

Color uniqueness is also not required

I think there's some code cleanup I want to do to all of this before I think about moving forward too much. I would like to get a better handle on positioning of those tiles, utilizing the character name and information text, and think of a clean way to read controller input from all 4 controllers. Before moving to the next Game State, I also need to determine what defines a character in the code, since the only thing being sent to the next Game State will be active players and what characters those players have selected.