Something that has always been scary (well, it’ still is) before launching Vizati is tech support. No matter how much you tested your game, it’s bound to have bugs. Also what I’ve realized is that I don’t spend enough time testing the game, oh and you too, yes YOU (I’m assuming you’re a developer of course). The past year I gather around a few friends who never played it to test the game for 2 days. 6 people played it the first day, 4 played it on the second day. We gathered around all complaints and issues and addressed them. After that there was more play-testing but not as aggressive. There were 3 or 4 persons testing it regularly. ...

It’s little over a month since I said I wouldn’t do any more porting for Vizati. Lesson learned, don’t say never again… When I started making the engine in C++ with an OpenGL/DirectX layer, I tried to keep in mind a multi-platform environment. Keeping rendering and OS specific calls abstract from the game itself and the engine to a certain level was one of my goals. Easy to say, hard to accomplish. Anyway the engine already supports Windows, iPhone and iPad. ...

So another year has come to an end, time to make plans for a new one and look back on what has been done. This was one crazy year, where I embraced indie development as my free time “hobby”. This picture illustrates my year very well, dark link is a bonus since my twitter handle is DJ_Link I’m tired, but happy and hoping that these were the first steps on something greater and bigger. Developing Vizati turned out a much more complex task that I imagined, making everything from the ground up, from engine to the actual game for 5 different platforms took me around 3x more time that I expected. Valuables lessons were learned so I’d be a fool to repeat those mistakes again. ...

Yeahhh!!!! Just got an email a couple of hours ago confirming that Vizati for Windows Phone 7 won first prize on Microsoft XapFest. Here’s a link, be warned it’s in Portuguese, although it’s on the Microsoft official webpage I couldn’t figure out how to translate that to English on the website itself. Just use Google translate or so. This is great for us since Vizati has now 2 awards and this time the prizes are a Xbox360 + Kinect and a Windows Phone 7 device. This is really great since I don’t have a device and I can now test the game properly and use it for future games development. The Kinect is also great but I more excited on using it for my own projects that actually playing it (geek). ...

It’s been awhile since my last post. Regular visitors know that for the last months I’ve been working mainly on Vizati, bringing it first from the Xbox360 (never released, no xblig here) to a PC digital release, followed by a complete rewrite of the engine to C++/OpenGL for a iPhone port, next there was the Windows Phone 7 version. I had the iPad on a backburner since I don’t own a device and optimizing code without seeing the result is crappy but about 2 weeks ago it went gold and it’s finished. ...

I’ve been playing with polygons and collisions lately so I decided to share some stuff. Using rectangles to detect if the mouse is inside is handy for Buttons and rectangular shaped objects, but what about other irregular shaped objects? Taking this into account I decided to create a Polygon class that basically has a List of Vector3 points. Although I’m just covering 2D collision you should use Vector3 for a more generic class. ...

Since I’m out of the countries where WP7 Marketplace is available it’s been a real pain to check out new games and most of all if Vizati was already available. Btw it’s out there, go give it a try, there’s a trial mode. It’s great fun 🙂 So searching some forums I found a neat code to check this on the simulator. Basically create a new WP7 Silverlight App and write this main page code ...

UPDATE: Pressure works, Microsoft backs down over XBLIG changes: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/news/a286779/microsoft-backs-down-over-xblig-changes.html Let me start by saying that this is just a personal opinion, nothing more, nothing less. It was with great sadness that I saw what the latest update to the Xbox360 dashboard did to Xbox Indie Games See? XBLIG is now on the “Speciality Shops”, right next to Avatar Marketplace, not even worthy of being the Games section. Even if you search a XBLIG game there it won’t return any result. ...

For my current project I’ve been working with A* as a path-finding solution. Basically it’s a way to get from point A to point B. This is used for AI in games mostly on tiled based games, It’s very simple to understand and implement. As A* traverses the graph, it follows a path of the lowest known cost, keeping a sorted priority queue of alternate path segments along the way. If, at any point, a segment of the path being traversed has a higher cost than another encountered path segment, it abandons the higher-cost path segment and traverses the lower-cost path segment instead. This process continues until the goal is reached. ...

I don’t usually write reviews about games, maybe mostly because I don’t play as often as I used to. Most games today are just graphics graphics, I use super shader ray-traced lights but I forgot gameplay because I’m a tech demo. I grew up with a Super Nintendo playing Super Mario World and Zelda A Link to the Past, yeah shocker, no Spectrum to me :P, so I’m 2D gameplay type lover. ...