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…
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.
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!
Suitor 2
Sequel to the award-winning 2009 puzzle game Suitor. Suitor is an addictively challenging strategic puzzle game with endless possibilities.
Building on its predecessor, Suitor 2 has:
- all new graphics
- improved touch screen controls
- a more in-depth step-by-step interactive tutorial
- 2 new difficulty levels ( for a total of 8 )
- colorblind friendly features still
- an all new global challenge mode
Can you take on the gauntlet of puzzles and compete? With such a deep set of puzzle possibilities it’s easy to hop on board for some quick fun brain flexing on the go…
The Eye
The Eye is a devious mathematical brainteaser puzzle. While the premise of unifying the colors is simple, you’ll have to get the sequence right in order to do it. Can you challenge yourself to unlock its secrets and discover what “The Order” is?