Game Development

No, I’m not dead….yet… It’s just that I’ve been stuck on Different Pixel development dungeon for the past weeks finishing and polishing (bug hunting) my first game, Vizati. Most of you have been following the process and asking things every since we showed the beta version at XNA Pizza Night, after which we decided to finish the game and try to sell it to see how it goes. Three months later and here I am, making the final touches on the game before it’s release on 11th June. The game will be available thought GamersGate (maybe others, I’ll update in the future). ...

It’s been awhile since my last post. I’ve been utterly busy so I haven’t had the time for any tutorials. This week I got an invitation from João Antão to showcase Vizati as part of his XNA Framework presentation. This occurred during the Imagine Cup final on Portugal. I’ve been playing with the WP7 tools and I decided to try and port Vizati to XNA 4.0 and give it a try on the emulator so I could show all 3 versions running simultaneous. The result was pretty good i think. It’s virtually identical. ...

I’ve seen this quite a bit around on XNA forums and got 2 emails last week asking about this: I want to make a 3000×3000 grass background by tiling this small grass image I have. Should I make one big image or should I make a for cycle drawing the image (3000/TileSize) times? My answer is neither of them. The big image has a huge impact on every Draw and more, you are limiting your map to the max Texture Size the graphic card can handle. ...

Note: 22/04/2013 – Due to popular request I made an article about achieving this effect in OpenGL Independent Resolution Rendering?? What’s this all about? Basically a way of not caring what you resolution is. Ever had Gui elements misplaced because you changed the resolution? Or getting out of the screen? If you are doing a game on Xna just for Xbox360 you can basically use a 1280×720 base resolution and the Xbox will scale the game for you making the proper Letterbox. ...

So I was watching Microsoft Mix10 and while talking about the new Windows Phone 7 Series, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. What? But like now now? I went to http://developer.windowsphone.com/ and XNA Creator’s Club and there it was. The packages contains: A CTP of the new Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Tools and framework to develop Windows Phone applications and games with Silverlight A CTP of XNA Game Studio 4.0 that allows you to develop Windows Phone games with the XNA Framework A Windows Phone 7 Series emulator that can be used to deploy and debug Windows Phone applications and games Add-on to allow you to use the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate to develop Windows Phone applications and games if you have it installed Pretty good right? For those who have been living under a rock the XNA 4.0 brings another development platform, Windows Phone 7 series, which leaves us with XBOX360, PC and the new mobile. ...

Damn you should see my face when they told me we won the competition XNA Pizza Night 2010 at Microsoft. Originally we developed Vizati to enter Dream Build Play 2010. We started developing the game on the beginning of February and during that month we discovered another competition would be held near Dream Build Play deadline. We went there with the same demo we sent to DBP. The audience really liked the game and we got very positive feedback. I remember during the first minutes someone in the audience asking if the game was already on sale and where could they buy it. ...

Rita and I have been working on a demo for entering Dream Build Play competition and today she has finally finished the teaser for Vizati. It’s our game for entering the Dream Build Play 2010 competition and XNA Pizza Night. We started working on this around 3 weeks ago so it’s still an early draft from our vision of the game. Vizati is a puzzle game made by Different Pixel for Dream Build Play 2010 in which you need to connect the little vizati stones by color. There’s 2 different modes of playing it. One of them is story mode where the stone Vizati is discovered by some people and they try to find out what it is and uncover it’s secrets. The other one, Arcade mode is a more traditional way to play it but with special vizati stones and power-ups ...

It’s been a long week. Even though I’ve always pointed to a make a very simple game for Dream Build Play so that I may actually have the time to finish it I just lost almost two day doing something to show for about 3 or 4 seconds per level. Discussing how we should make our puzzle appear and disappear between each level we decided that a particle system or an effect of such nature would be nice to show apart from some fading or something on the puzzle itself. Then it began, the one task that all programmers should ask someone else to do, because once you get the first one working you are gonna keep adding features because is so FUC**** pretty 😀 ...

Well the title is an Homage to James Silva‘s I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 I’ve been really busy with my Dream Build Play game lately. Although being a simple game somethings always turn out to be harder that we initial think. I’ve been debating myself with some bugs on my engine, had to redo tons of code yesterday due to XBOX360 compatibilities (should have tested earlier :P). Two days ago Rita started doing the assets and it’s looking really good. ...

One of the things I realized is very handy when prototyping or debugging is to draw a line on a specific location. Like drawing lines around collision boxes to see if your character is making a proper collision. For my games I’ve made a small LineBatch. Basically LineBatch uses a SpriteBatch to draw the lines by stretching a 1×1 white Texture2D to your line size. You can give it 2 points ( start and end point of course) and a color. There’s an overload function that receives the Layer parameter. ...