As I mentioned in my last post, Farseer Games is moving to a new host: squarespace

The domain transfer is already in progress. Should be just a couple more days until it’s complete.

Till then, for those interested, here is a sneak peak at the new site. Not much has changed, but future tweaks should be easier now.

Check out the new site here: http://farseergames.squarespace.com/

-Jeff Weber

I’m in the process of changing website hosts for Farseer Games.

Currently this site is hosted on www.CrystalTech.com and they have been great as a host. I highly recommend them.

So why the heck am I moving then?

I’m trying to minimize the work required to maintain my website and blog.  Currently, the website is an ASP.Net forms app and the blog is using BlogEngine.Net. 

Nothing wrong with either of these but since I have limited time for development I decided to try a more all-in-one solution that is more cloud-based maintenance process.

The service/host I’m moving to is www.SquareSpace.com.  I’ve got most my site/blog moved over, including the games, now I’m just waiting for the domain name to transfer so I can finish things up.

One thing to note. If you currently subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog you will need to update it once the transfer is complete.  I apologize for that.  I was able to keep most site-links working, but the RSS feed had to change.

I’m anxious to complete this move so I can get back to the fun stuff: working on Krashlander.

-Jeff Weber

A great new portal for Silverlight Games came on-line today!  The community features look great.

It’s like Kongregate for Silverlight games!

Congrats Silver Arcade team

Go take a look and have some fun!

www.SilverArcade.com

-Jeff Weber

Krashlander has been moving along at a steady pace.  I just completed the guts of my landscape system and it’s working great so far.

I also did some graphical work on the main Krashlander character.  Nothing is final yet, but I like the look so far. Let me know what you think.

Here are some screenshots of the Krashlander character:

Here is a tech preview video:

Here is how the landscape system works at a high level:

1. Use online editor to create in-memory path objects (online editor still needs to be developed)
2. At save time, convert all Path objects to mini-language, string representations and dump them into an XML document that represents the state of a game-level.
3. Save the XML document to either isolated storage or the cloud.
4. At load time, read through the XML document and convert all mini-language strings to in-memory Path objects.
5. Create a point list approximation of the Paths using the PathToPoint converter.
6. Use the point list to initialize the landscape physics.

For those interested here is my little test harness for converting from path to points.  (This demo doesn’t have any of the physics stuff, this is JUST for testing the path to points.)

LinearApproximationDemo.zip  (I used code from here and here while developing this demo)

Now it’s time to start developing the online editor for Krashlander. This will not be a small task.  Should be fun work, though.

-Jeff Weber

Andy Beaulieu launched a new Silverlight physics game today.

Here’s a screenshot:

Here’s his blog post about the launch.

Here’s where you can play it.

Check it out and have fun boss-launching!

Andy built this game using his  Physics Helper for Silverlight, Blend, and Farseer

-Jeff

Most of last week was spent digesting all the news that came out of MIX09 the week before.

Off the top of my head, my favorite new Silverlight 3 features are:

1. GPU Acceleration – When developing games, better performance is always desirable.
2. Navigation/Deep Linking – I’ve got some great ideas (or so I think) how I can make use of deep linking in Krashlander. (Will go into more detail in a future post)
3. Writeable Bitmaps – Just seems like this is going to be really useful for a number of things.
4. Offline Support – I think it’ll be nice to have the option to allow people to play my games offline and outside the browser.

There are a lot of other cool new features announced for Silverlight 3, but these are the ones that stick out for me right now.

Regarding Krashlander development for the last week:

I got the Silverlight 3 development environment setup and all the Krashlander projects converted.

I updated my navigation system to utilize the new Navigation and Deep Liking functionality.

Finally, I started (continued actually) working on the landscape/level system for Krashlander.  Hopefully I’ll have something cool to show next week. (crosses fingers…)

Jeff Weber.
Follow me on Twitter  for more frequent updates on Krashlander.

As I mentioned in my last Krashlander post, Krashlander is inspired by an old favorite game called Ski Stunt Simulator.

While this is true, it is not my intention to simply clone Ski Stunt and call it a day.  The primary concept I’m borrowing from Ski Stunt is the control scheme.  Everything else in Krashlander, outside of some larger ideas and concepts, is yet to be prototyped and designed.

Prototyping Roller-Skis With Suspension

Last week I worked on prototyping a different sort of “ski”. My idea was to try something more like a roller-ski with suspension.  Here is the best example of a roller-ski I could find on the web. This one doesn’t have suspension but it looks pretty cool.

I quickly thru together a prototype and took a few runs down my crappy looking test landscape. (same landscape you saw in my 1st prototype video of Krashlander)

Here is some footage using the “roller skis” :

Prototype Results

While I still love the idea of roller-skis with suspension, so far they have not turned out to work as well as I’d have liked.

The roller-skis tend to reduce the amount of control you have.  They either bounce too much or they are too “soft” and it’s hard to do flips.  I have not been able to find a good set of parameters yet to give them the “feel” I want.

I haven’t made a final decision yet, but right now I’m leaning away from roller-skis with suspension. I’m going to remove the suspension and see how it feels with just the wheels.

The plan for next week

The Silverlight  3 beta came out last week and it has a number of new features I need to understand prior to continuing with Krashlander.  The feature I’m most excited about it the GPU acceleration. This should provide great performance boost when done right.

I’ll be spending next week porting my current Krashlander code over to Silverlight 3 and figuring out what needs to change to take best advantage of the new features.

Have a good week all…

-Jeff

The fine folks over at the cool Silverlight games portal, Mashooo.com, have officially announced there Silverlight game development contest.

Mashooo.com is proud to announce the first ever, world open, Silverlight game development contest.

It is an open "no holds barred" style competition, meaning that people from around the world are free to participate and there are no theme limitations. Just bring your talent and zest for Silverlight game development and show the world what you can do.

The contest will begin on March 18, 2009 and last for around 3 months.

The approximate retail value (ARV) of all the prizes is more than $10,000 USD in cash and software packages.

In related news… I’ve been asked to be a Judge for the contest and I was more than happy to accept the offer.

Head on over to the S-Prize contest page for more details…

-Jeff Weber

I have recently begun development on my next Silverlight game. It’s called Krashlander.

Krashlander is a game I’ve been waiting a long time to develop.  It is heavily inspired by, and in some ways a tribute to, an old favorite game of mine called Ski Stunt Simulator.

The thing that blew me away about Ski Stunt Simulator and the thing that made me want to develop Krashlander, is the control scheme. (see below)

 
Control instructions from Ski Stunt Simulator

If you’ve played my other Silverlight game, Diver, then you know the control mechanic I’m talking about. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for?

I really believe this control scheme has been severely under utilized across the gaming ecosystem.

Diver actually served as a sort of “warm-up” game to Krashlander.  Instead of jumping right in and working on Krashlander, I decided to build Diver first in order to become familiar with the Silverlight platform.

Krashlander will be a bit more forgiving than Diver, but will still require skillful control of the mouse.

I could go on, but instead I’ll  save some details for subsequent posts.

I plan to post weekly developer updates about Krashlander on this blog and daily developer updates on Twitter. (follow me to see the updates).

Before I sign off, here is a video from a very early developer proof of concept.

Enjoy!

-Jeff

Any good game development platform needs a game engine to extract away some of the repetitive, less exciting work required to build a game.

I have been wondering if anyone would build such an engine for Silverilght.  Well, someone is/has.

That person is John Kanalakis and company over at Envy Games. The game engine is called PlayBits.

I’ve been in brief contact with John and it sounds like they are very close to releasing at least a limited beta version.

It’s impossible to know right now how useful the PlayBits engine will be for making games, but judging just by the feature list, it certainly looks promising. (see below. This is copied from Envy Games website)

<snip>

The PlayBits Game Engine for Silverlight 2.0

Looking for an easy way to create Games for the Web using the C# programming languag? The PlayBits Game Engine for Silverlight 2.0 is the answer. The PlayBits engine uses Microsoft’s Silverlight Web plug-in for Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox to render rich Web games. Your game code is implemented entirely in C# and XAML (the markup language used by Silverlight and WPF). The PlayBits game engine features rich support for making 2D games with 3D games on the way.

Features

High-Speed Render Loop and Fixed-Step Game Update Loop
Powerful Scene Graph with Scene Loading & Unloading
Component System for Modular Game Design
Physics System with Rigid Collision Support and Math Helpers
An Efficient Resource Manager for Keeping Memory Consumption Down
Multi-Layered Rendering with dynamic Sort Ordering
Connect Scene Objects Together with Object Mounting
Flexible Particle Effect System
Dynamic Input Manager to Dynamically Shift Game Control
Flexible Input Support for Keyboard, Mouse, and Ink
Event Scheduler and SceneObject Trigger
Seamlessly Integrate Silverlight Graphical User Interface Elements
Integrated Event Logging with Framerate Metrics Capture
Custom SceneObject Type Assignment and Comparison
Rich Media Support for Integrated Photos and Videos
Multiplayer Networking Support
Localization and Multiplatform Support via Silverlight
Local Data Storage for Saved Game States
Optional High Score and Game Data Cloud Storage Support

Game Objects

Static Sprites, Animated Sprited, Scrolling Sprites
Object Templates and Spawners
Tilemap and Tiles
Chase, Avoid, and Path-Following AI

Game Types

Create a wide variety of game types, including:
Arcade Classic Games
Side-Scrolling Games
Isometric Games
Racing Games
Sports Games
RPG-Adventure Games
Real-Time Strategy Games

Game Level Design

Game level design is accomplished with Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 for Windows XP /Vista and Mac OS. Game code is written within Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, or it’s FREE counterpart Visual C# Express 2008.

Developer Support

Primary Developer Support is available via online Forums. Product documentation and Developer Articles & Resources will be free available online at EnvyGames.com

Availability

Spring 2009
$299 Retail Price

</snip>

-Jeff Weber