A Stitch in Time
Have you been playing No Time To Explain?
If so, you might have noticed the image on the left.
It’s a call to try out my new card game. I’ll be having (a) play test beta session(s) on Saturday at PAX in Seattle. Feel free to come find me. I’ll be where ever the free play board/card games are, and I’ll probably post something here again too.
More details to come in the future!
Switching Over
Figure I should switch over to the new format. Still haven’t had a chance to convert everything over to the new format.
You can still see our latest projects here.
If you’d like to visit the old site, please click here.
Been pretty busy at my day job lately and sprucing up our home. One of these days, I’ll get around to doing this full-time. In the meantime, hopefully you can live with infrequent but meaningful updates.
Spruced up Templating
Spent some time working on the new website format here. Got the nice icon in the banner and fixed the site image on the right.
Things have been pretty busy the past few months, so its been pretty quiet around here. Look for some more info & news soon though.
Trials and Tribulations in Creating a Complex Two-Tiered Leveling System
I must say when I set out to do this task, I figured it wouldn’t take me a few days of thinking to figure out. What was I trying to do? Something seemingly simple, a blend of mathematics for the leveling system in my new game…
Aside: Now, I used to love math when I was a kid. I was good at it, it made sense, and it let you do a lot of cool stuff. I still realize its importance, but university pretty much killed my love for math by making me memorize formulas I knew how to use to take tests… And if you don’t know already, my memory is like a sieve…
Anyway, the world of video games usually involves a lot of these calculations, and I’ll laboriously call back my skills and try and figure things out. Usually this is difficult late at night after working all day, so it’ll usually take me a couple of days on and off thinking about the problem in different ways to solve it. This is just another one of those stories…
Iterating and Removing Items from a List
I’ve been working on a game this weekend. (I think this is the first time I’ll publicly announce something ahead of time! It’s been going really well, and I think I’ll be able to post a couple of articles about development while I’m at it.)
So, when I start a new game, I need to clean-up my display and remove all the objects on it. This usually calls for the "let’s iterate through the list and remove the items" (as I need to do many steps for each thing I remove). However, this also applies in cases where you just want to check the item (such as for a collision detection) and remove it conditionally.
Getting Around Pivot Control SelectedIndex Bug
For those of you not aware, there’s a bug in the WP7 Pivot control. It crashes if you try and set the SelectedIndex to 2. Hopefully, you’ve encountered this during testing and found this trying to solve it. Hopefully it’ll just be fixed in a future update, but that doesn’t help now.
I tried a few things, but for Suitor 2 landed on the following solution as the simplest. The only impact it has is that your first Pivot page will display briefly before it pans to the one you desired to set programmatically. All you need to do is rig up the “Loaded” event on your Pivot control. Then you can dispatch the call to change the index, like so:
[HD Intros] Suitor 2 for WP7
Find out more about Suitor 2 in this lovely HD video also showcasing the fabulous Samsung Focus.
[Review] Family Game Night 3 (Wii)
Family Game Night 3 for Wii (MSRP 39.95) is a collection of classic board games including Life, Clue, Mousetrap, Yahtzee Hands Down, and “Twister”.
Overall: 
There’s nothing new about the classics in this collection, but that’s what they are: classics. Get ready to gather some friends on a rainy day and relive those classic board-game memories. While it won’t keep you engaged for more than an hour at a time, it’s a fun casual collection which is fun for a group.
Moving on from Mouse Events to Multi-touch
Well, let’s try another post. First time I’m writing a public development journal, so we’ll see how it goes.
I really just want to share knowledge I’ve gained over hard hours of research and trial and error so others can learn from my own experiences.
So, there’s some built-in manipulation support in Silverlight meant for something like zooming in or rotating an image. Which is great if you have a simple app viewing some single object. There’s also some handy gesture libraries emerging and some built-in support via XNA. I found out about that from this other post here.
It’s really quite cleaver and according to the current marketplace guidelines should pass certification as its not one of the forbidden XNA references (when using Silverlight):
4.2.5 The application must not call any APIs in the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game assembly or the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics assembly when using any methods from the System.Windows.Controls namespace.
In either case, what I really wanted was to be able to track the specific multiple points of the player and not just some gesture they may be trying to input.
Coloring the Horizon
Hi All,
Figured I should start somewhere with this. Have a back log of things I want to talk about that I’ve discovered during the development of my two Windows Phone 7 (WP7) games. But I can sort through those slowly. For now, I can talk about current things. I love colors, so I figured I’d just start with a quick and dirty list of the different theme accent colors:
Blue FF1BA1E2
Brown FFA05000
Green FF339933
Lime FF8CBF26
Magenta FFFF0097
Orange FFF09609
Pink FFE671B8
Purple FFA200FF
Red FFE51400
Teal FF00ABA9
Now, you shouldn’t be using these directly as there’s a resource for the currently active one: {StaticResource PhoneAccentColor}, but if you wanted to use a palette in your game that used the other theme colors for potential flavor; they’re not really listed anywhere that I found.
Anyway, I’m doing some experiments in multi-touch. So, I’ll post a bit more about doing some stuff with that later.
And for the curious both The Eye and Suitor 2 were made for Silverlight using Blend 4 and VS2010 and are both ready in the Marketplace for the US launch! Find out more about the games themselves in the Marketplace or at http://www.mikeware.com/projects.php.
Enjoy!
questions at mikeware dot com
