Special thanks to all the beta testers.  You were all a great help and the game is better because of your feedback.

Here is a link to play the game:

http://www.farseergames.com/divergame2 

Here is the official video trailer:

Here are some screens:

Here is what’s next for me?

I plan to spend most of this week getting the word out about Diver 2. (Marketing! yay! …sarcasm)

Once marketing is done I think I will take some time to experiment with the Push Button Engine.  I’d love to get some of my games running in Flash so they can reach more people.

I may also play around a bit with some ideas I have for possible future versions of Diver and/or Krashlander.

That’s it for now. 

Enjoy the game and spread the word!

-Jeff Weber

Quick, name an online games portal.  Now tell me what platforms they support.

I'm guessing your answer to the second question was Flash.  Flash is a behemoth in the online games ecosystem. Today it pretty much IS the online games ecosystem.

Thing is, while Flash has been and still is a great platform for building online games, it's no longer the only show in town.

A number of developers, myself included, are writing our online games with Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash-like technology.

Diver 2: A Silverlight game I’m currently working on.

Others are using the a game technology called Unity that allows a developer to write full-blown, true-3D games that run in the browser. 

Velociraptor Safari: A Unity Game by the guys from Blurst

Still other early adopters are beginning to toy with game development using the still-in-the-works HTML 5 spec.

It's been my contention for a while now that Flash-ONLY online game portals are the present, but not the future of online games. 

The online game portals of the future, the next-gen game portals if you prefer, will open themselves up to these other ,non-Flash, platforms and their devoted legions of game developers.

To be clear, I'm not contending that Flash becomes any less relevant in this new open ecosystem, it's just getting some new friends to hang with.

On Dec 15th, Kongregate announced Konduit and became the first major portal to open itself to non-Flash games.

From the Konduit website:

Konduit is a new application platform that allows developers to integrate any browser-based game with Kongregate’s array of community features. Developers can now use JavaScript, ActionScript or REST APIs from their own back-end to tap into features such as achievements, leaderboards, virtual goods, profiles, and chat.

This means Unity games, Silverlight games, JavaFX games and actually any games that can be hosted on a website are supported by the Kongregate portal through their new IFrame hosting feature.  Furthermore, since Konduit supports javascript and REST access to it’s api’s most of these technologies should be able to utilize the many game related services Kongregate offers.  I applaud them for this move and for having the foresight to see a bigger picture.

Personally, I've been wanting to get my Silverlight games on Kongregate since the first day I found Kongregate on the web.  The morning after I read the Konduit announcement I submitted my game, Tire Storm, to Kongregate using the new IFrame option offered by Kongregate.  It took much less than an hour!

The game went into preview mode and went into a queue to be reviewed by Kongregate.   A few hours later I received the following email from Jim Greer, CEO of Kongregate:

Hi Jeff - 

I published this for you. Congrats, you're the first Silverlight game on Kongregate...

You can see and play Tire Storm on Kongregate here.

For those that don’t feel like jumping over there, here’s a screenshot.

Silverlight game on Kongregate

I look forward now to digging into the Konduit platform API and livening up my current and future games with the services the new system offers to us non-Flash game developers.

Finally, on behalf of all us non-Flash developers, A BIG, BIG THANK YOU to the Kong!

-Jeff Weber

Wait, wait, wait… how do you submit a non-Flash game to Kongregate, you ask?

1. Get your game onto the web in a blank html page. (Nothing but your game in the top left corner of the screen)
2. Get a Kongregate account here
3. Go to the Konduit page here
4. Near the bottom of the page you will see a section title “Non-Flash Games”  Click the “Click here” link and fill out the forms and follow the instructions. (Here is the direct link to the IFrame upload page. Notice the “iframe=true” at the end of the url: http://www.kongregate.com/games/new?iframe=true)
5. Be sure to have a friendly fall-back message for those that do not have the plug-in required to play your game.  Here is mine.. could be better but hey.

Ok, that’s all… have fun.

Here is the video:

-Jeff Weber

+

=

50.05% Silverlight Install Base

Stats come from www.riastats.com

Here’s a link to the book on Amazon: 3D Game Development with Microsoft Silverlight 3: Beginner's Guide

Here is the description from Amazon:

A practical guide to creating real-time responsive online 3D games in Silverlight 3 using C#, XBAP WPF, XAML, Balder, and Farseer Physics Engine

• Develop online interactive 3D games and scenes in Microsoft Silverlight 3 and XBAP WPF
• Integrate Balder 3D engine 1.0, Farseer Physics Engine 2.1, and advanced object-oriented techniques to simplify the game development process
• Enhance development with animated 3D characters, sounds, music, physics, stages, gauges, and backgrounds
• Packed with inspiring, realistic examples offering impressive graphics, strong performance, and a rich interactive experience

Looks interesting and definitely worth a look.

-Jeff Weber

By playing certain participating games, players can earn “Mdollars” that will eventually earn them various tangible prizes.

Tire Storm is currently one of the games you can play to earn these “Mdollars”.  Each day, the top score in Tire Storm will receive 4 Mdollars.

Mashooo also runs periodic contests that can earn you even more “Mdollars”.   See the “Last man standing” challenge in the screenshot below.

Very cool stuff.  I really like where Mashooo is going with their site.  Why don’t you head on over an earn some  “M-ching”.

-Jeff Weber

So far I have 2 levels complete… well almost complete.  I still need to create some new background images.  I’m tired of the existing three backgrounds from Diver 1

The 2 levels I have completed aren’t really anything too new.  Just some simple straight in dives to warm players up.  The next level I’m going to build will introduce the new “spinner” obstacle.  It’ll knock you around pretty good if you have the fortune of hitting one.

Anyway, here are some screenshots of the first 2 levels. 

Diver 2 (Dive 2-1)

Diver 2 (Dive 2-2)

Now, back to work…

-Jeff Weber

I had to add one more thing to my list that I forgot to add originally.  I needed to build the web page to host the game and decided to clean up the rest of the site a bit as well.  I’m working on that now and I’m close to done.

After that, it’s nothing but the fun stuff… making levels!

Here is the updated progress list.  The crossed out items are things I decided to cut in the interest of time.

To Do:

• Design/Create 30 new levels

• Create new landing page with spinner on it.

• New video trailer

  • Possibly see if someone would like to help with this as I suck at making vids.
  • Could give away early access to the game in trade.
  • Got a couple people interested in doing this. (great!)

Working On It:

• Cleanup website

Completed:

• Add support for Google analytics

• Number of dives started
• Number of succeful divers

• Update the render loop to use CompositionTarget instead of Storyboard. (Thanks Silverlight 3)

• Look into local storage code to make sure it’ll work with the new version of the game.

• Reduce the game foot print on the screen. (Currently takes up to much space vertically)

• Refactor load-level logic to reduce duplicate code

• Implement spinners to be built using a Canvas + child paths.

  • Utilize multiple geoms per body.
  • Canvas = Body

• Make diving boards configurable from Expression Blend.

  • Create a bare-bones custom control with some simple properties that can be read out in code

• Enable GPU acceleration (thank you Silverlight 3)

  • Particles
  • Diver
  • Spinners
  • H20

• Try updating to Farseer Physics Engine 2.x (Diver is currently built on an old version of the engine)

  • Thoroughly test everything in the game.
  • If the upgrade doesn’t go well stick with existing version of engine.
• Trees/Plants (non-interactive only.) time permitting.

-Jeff Weber

You can check it out live and try to top the high score list by playing it here on my site or over at Mashooo.

Let me know what you think or if you run into any bugs with it.

-Jeff Weber

This week’s development on Diver 2 has gone well. 

The biggest item completed was getting the code re-factored to a point where I could create all the new Diver levels using Expression Blend.  I can now set diver’s start position, draw out landscapes and collision polygons, place and configure diving boards, and place and configure the buoys all within Expression Blend.  I use to have to muck with the code to get everything going.

None of this is anything fancy, but it’s very functional and should make level building much easier.

I’m a big fan of pictures, so here are some screen shots of a prototype/test dive.  

The first screenshot is what the dive looks like inside of Blend.  The red depicts the collision geometry, the green circle is the start position for diver, the blue rectangle controls where the buoys are placed, and the red sticking out of the cliff that looks like a diving board is, ta-da, where the diving board is placed.

In Expression Blend (editing)

This second screenshot is the in-game view of the same level.

In Game

If you are tracking my development progress, here is the updated task list.  As mentioned last time, this list is broken into three categories: Things I still need to do, things I’m currently working on, and things completed.

To Do:

• Try updating to Farseer Physics Engine 2.x (Diver is currently built on an old version of the engine)

  • Thoroughly test everything in the game.
  • If the upgrade doesn’t go well stick with existing version of engine.

• Create new landing page with spinner on it.

• Trees/Plants (non-interactive only.) time permitting.

• New video trailer

  • Possibly see if someone would like to help with this as I suck at making vids.
  • Could give away early access to the game in trade.

• Add support for Google analytics

  • Number of dives started
  • Number of successful dives
  • Levels stats
  • Anything else that seems worth tracking.

• Design/Create 30 new levels

Working On It:

• Update the render loop to use CompositionTarget instead of Storyboard. (Thanks Silverlight 3)

• Enable GPU acceleration (thank you Silverlight 3)

  • Particles
  • Diver
  • Spinners
  • H20

Completed:

• Look into local storage code to make sure it’ll work with the new version of the game.

• Reduce the game foot print on the screen. (Currently takes up to much space vertically)

• Refactor load-level logic to reduce duplicate code

• Implement spinners to be built using a Canvas + child paths.

  • Utilize multiple geoms per body.
  • Canvas = Body

• Make diving boards configurable from Expression Blend.

  • Create a bare-bones custom control with some simple properties that can be read out in code

-Jeff Weber