Krashlander UI

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been working on the Krashlander UI.  My goal, as always, is to keep things simple.  I really liked the way the new Windows Phone 7 pivot control looked and felt, so I decided to use it as my primary UI.

Krashlander UI Demo

I’m very much down to brass-tacks on Krashlander.  The only outstanding items I have are:

• Create the remaining 8 levels and tune them for performance and feel.
• Add trial logic to entice players to purchase the game.
• Create all the ancillary media for the marketplace and Windows Phone 7 menus.
• Finish any other odds and ends that crop up while doing the 3 tasks above.

I won’t be able to tune the levels for feel until I get my hands on  another device.  Hopefully I can get hold of one prior to launch.  If somebody has one that they could part with for a week PLEASE let me know.

I’m really looking forward to getting Krashlander into some hands other than mine.  I think it’s a unique game and I’m anxious to find out what others think.

@jeffweber
www.farseergames.com

Touching Krashlander

I’ve been spending every spare moment I have getting Krashlander ready for the Window Phone 7 launch.  I decided today to take a few minutes away from development and put together a short video.

The following video shows how the touch controls for Krashlander operate.  Essentially, moving your thumb over the touch surface on the right controls the posture of Krashlander on the left.  There is a bit of math involved to get this working smoothly, but I think it’s pretty intuitive after a few minutes playing with it.

The overlay icons on the right are just there to help guide the user as they learn the controls.  Once comfortable, they can be shut off making for a better view of the game screen.

Enough jabber, here’s the vid:

One last note.  I actually scaled up the size of Krashlander for the video.  In actual gameplay, he/she will be a bit smaller.

-Jeff Weber
@jeffweber

Application Icon for Krashlander

As a quick distraction today, I created an application icon for Krashlander.

Let me know what you think.  As always, I tried to keep it simple.

Krashlander Character Control in Development

I’ve been working lately on the main character for krashlander.  The game is named after the main character.

Thought I’d throw out some sceenshots and a video to show how things are progressing.

Here is how things look in Expression Blend. I have some custom joint (blue circles) and rigid body controls (orange rectangles) that map to physics entities when the game loads.

Currently everything is rectangles, but I can define custom collision polygons for all the body parts.

Here’s a video of krashlander in action… keep in mind this is all just developer graphics.

That’s all for now… gotta get back to coding!

-Jeff Weber

Video Tire Storm Game Running on Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator

Here is a quick video I made of my Silverlight game, Tire Storm, running on the Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator.

Took me about an hour for the basic port an another 45 minutes or so of tweaking things.

-Jeff Weber

Diver 2 First-Look Video

I just put together a quick video of Diver 2.   The game is getting close to beta.  Just need to polish up the graphics a bit and tweak some of the levels then I will open it up to beta testers.

Here is the video:

-Jeff Weber

Silverlight on XBox ?

I was perusing the web today and came across an interesting post on teamxbox titled Live Blog of Microsoft Post-Briefing Luncheon

About half way down I came across this:

1:02pm—Question about Another live download video. Whitten: Silverlight being used as "presentation layer."

Why is this news?  Well there had been rumors that Silverlight would eventually make its way to the XBox, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen hard evidence.

Seems like it’s only for video now, but hopefully in some future release it’ll be opened up to other uses. (crosses fingers…)