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. ...

I know there’s lot’s of this stuff over the internet but I keep bumping into people asking for this. A way to easily switch from a Game Screen to a Menu or Options without having tons of flags and “if” clauses on the class Game. I’ve made a small project with a Screen Manager. The ScreenManager is static and can contain Screens. Instead of having typical Draw Update functions drawing SpriteBatches on the Game class we should have something like this: ...

I recently faced myself with a really annoying bug on Flex 3, the “Flex Modules” section of the properties dialog is blank. After some search on the internet some suggested that it might be a resolution problem. What the f**? So I have to switch resolution to use a program? Adobe Support turned out a dead end so still no permanent fix for this. There is however a small thing you can do, just adjust the divider between the list on the left hand side of the dialog and the right hand content area. Just adjusting the divider a smidge will cause everything to magically appear. ...

Like some of you already know I’m currently out of job, the company where I worked like many out there closed due to, I don’t know, financial issues, bad management, who knows. Even worse the news got out just before Christmas and it was not the holidays I intended to have. Times have been hard, since the last pay check I got was in November. I worked there since 2006, almost 4 years, I joined the team back then in the hopes of joining something in the games industry. It was funny, built a couple of games, made part of big projects, learned much, learned that even more is to be learned. One year after I started making small prototype games on my free times as a joke and websites now and then for a couple of extra bucks. ...

When I started using C#, mainly because of XNA one of the things I got used to write is foreach loops instead of for, seemed easier and it’s a much cleaner code. Doing almost the same thing as a for loop I never really bother to see the differences, almost everyone in their XNA examples used it instead. Today I decided to see the differences between them: FOR int[] values = new int[1]; int total = 0; for(int i = 0; i < values.Length; i++) { total += values[i]; } FOREACH ...