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

This version throws out most of the old code and instead extends the current latest version of Box2D.

It also leverages the Box2D.XNA port of Box2D. 

For all the details about the latest version of the Farseer Physics Engine, go here.

Do go direct to the download go here

Personally, I’d like to say thanks to everyone that worked to get this release out.  Great job!

And now I’m off to port my game, Krashlander, to the FPE 3.0…

-Jeff Weber

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

The green dot in the upper left is the starting point for krashlander (the main character of the game) and if you look close you can see the enemy robot on the other end.

The goal, at least as things stand now, is to destroy all robots!  Pretty simple, actually, if you can get to them. (evil smile…)

A krashlander level as seen from the editor (Blend)

I’ll still tweak things a bit, but here is what things are looking like so far.

I hope to write up a more thorough update and provide a video sometime soon. 

Here are the screens:

Hello Window Phone 7 team, my name is Jeff Weber.  I’m a team-of-one Silverlight game developer and I’d like to officially request early access to one of the Windows Phone 7 developer kits. 

Immediately below is a short intro to the game I’m currently working on and beyond that are some of the things I’ve worked on in the past that show my commitment to Silverlight, Silverlight Games, and now Silverlight Games on Windows Phone 7.

My Windows Phone 7 Game

I’m currently deep into development of a Silverlight game for Windows Phone 7 called, Krashlander.  It is a physics based game that will be controlled entirely by touch-gestures. 

Videos speaks louder than words, so here is video of an early prototype:

Since this game relies heavily on well-tuned touch-based gestures, I will need an actual physical phone device in order to complete the game development for the Windows Phone 7 launch.

I think Krashlander has potential to be a viral hit and I think it’ll show off Windows Phone 7 well.

My dedication to Silverilght Game Development

Below is a list of the things that show my dedication and passion for all things Silverlight/Microsoft.

Silverlight Games: Diver and Diver 2

Diver and Diver 2 are by far my two most successful Silverlight games.  A version of Diver for Windows Phone 7 is definitely in the plans.

• Here is the video trailer for Diver 2. (It uses the same gesture based control that I’ll be using for Krashlander:

• Diver and Diver 2, combined, have been played over 600,000 times (based on page views). That translates to quite a few Silverlight plug-in installs by the online games community.

• Diver 2 is one of (if not the only) Silverlight game to make it on to the Jay Is Games Casual Gameplay website.

Silverlight Game: Tire Storm

Tire Storm is a more casual game that will also be ported to Windows Phone 7.  It’s biggest claim to fame, in my mind, is that it’s the only (I think) Silverlight game currently on the very popular online games portal, Kongregate. 

Farseer Physics Engine

I was the original developer of the Farseer Physics Engine.  The engine was originally developed for the XNA platform by myself and later ported to Silverlight by Bill Reiss.

The Farseer Physics Engine has been used in many projects across the web and the XNA Indie Games community.

While I have since handed off the ongoing development to a very capable group of developers from the community, I remain a heavy user of the engine and I think it has done a great deal of good for the XNA and Silverlight community.

Final Pitch

I am and have been a loyal Silverlight game developer with unique game ideas.  I plan to target Window Phone 7 for all my games going forward. 

As a lone-developer with big ideas, please consider me for a Windows Phone 7 developer device. 

If you have any questions, comments or advice for me, please contact me via one of the following.

Email: jeffweber@live.com
Twitter: @jeffweber

Thanks for your time,

Jeff Weber
www.farseergames.com

Ok, big game portals (Kongregate.com, ArmorGames.com, AddictingGames.com, NewGrounds.com, BubbleBox.com, ect… etc… etc…)  will you now please re-consider supporting Silverlight?

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

Things change quick these days.  Shortly after I made that post and started digging back into XNA, Microsoft announced details of their new Windows Phone 7 and caused me to stop and re-evaluate my direction.

I’ll spare the details and just sum some things up.  I decided I wanted to create a game for the new phone.  I went back and forth on whether to use XNA or Silverlight.  In the end I chose Silverlight because I like the platform and tools and I love working with vector graphics.

What game am I developing?

This one:

I’m also going to try something to keep myself blogging more frequently.  I’m going to take a lesson from twitter and force myself to write no blog posts longer than 1000 characters.   I’m very close to that now, so time to wrap it up.

In future blogs, I’ll try to go into more detail on the development of Krashlander. 

Jeff

(~975 characters not counting these.)

Check it out: