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Posts from the ‘News’ Category

28
Apr

Mikeware Enters ‘Battle Box’ into Ludum Dare #26

For those of you who may not know, Ludum Dare is a 48 Hour game making competition. A game must be made from start-to-finish in the 48 hour period. Entries are then played and voted on by the other participants in the three weeks following.

Originally, I wasn’t going to enter, but had a brainstorm for a simple game yesterday morning. That turned into the ‘Battle Box’.

You can see my Ludum Dare posts and entry here.

You can play Battle Box here.

There’s still some more work on it to come, but the two-player hot-seat version was ready to go, so seemed like a good announcement.

Update 4/30: Online version is now live.

26
Mar

[Release] Gamius Type IV (v2) ships on OUYA

Mikeware is happy to announce that “Gamius Type IV” will launch exclusively on the OUYA as it ships this coming weekend. The ONLYOUYA game will be available, in full, for free during the launch period.

Gamius Type IV (v2)

Gamius Type IV is a unique, retro styled, truly one button/one switch shmup (no analog sticks here). It is primarily meant as a multiplayer game and includes both co-op and asymmetric play. Players must navigate their ship using only the single button to avoid terrain and enemies as they try accumulate the highest score. Those of you familiar with Mikeware previously, may remember the Gamius Type IV prototype (available in our old project section). The game has been significantly revamped with bug fixes and added features for the OUYA.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term or genre of ‘Shmup’, then checkout Gamasutra’s or Racketboy’s great articles on their history and evolution.

Gamius Type IV was developed in C# using XNA and ported to OUYA using the Xamarin tools and MonoGame. Want to thank ‘slygamer’ from the MonoGame team for his quick replies and assistance in using the framework on Android.

21
Feb

Road Construction Down

The Game Crafter recently updated their site and we haven’t updated to their new template yet. Thus, Road Construction was automatically unpublished.

Have no fear though! A new edition of Road Construction with an improved box will be on it’s way. Look for it in late April along with more info about our next ‘Board Game’ project. You’ll know a bit about it already if you follow our Twitter feed.

19
Feb

Open Source WPF Chess Example Coming Soon

WPFChess

I worked on this Chess program for another project. I had started by looking at numerous available chess programs written in C# and using WPF, but alas did not find anything I felt was up to par as a basis for what I needed. They either made the chess/UI logic really complicated or had it tightly integrated or didn’t use WPF strengths.

So, I put this project together to use proper WPF data separation techniques through data binding and templates as well as using a MEF back-end to give me some flexibility with the piece creation (my project used this a bit more intensively, but I wanted to simplify the example that I release for demonstration). It just cuts to the chase.

I’m just adding some more comments and cleaning up the code a bit and hope to have it posted by the end of the month.

2
Sep

Reach for the Stars: Educating the Next Generation Using Games

Had a great weekend at PAX and PAXDev! As you may know, at PAXDev we gave a talk on our space simulation project given after the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam this year at Issaquah High School. It was requested that we post the slides to our talk. So without further ado…

Reach for the Stars Presentation

10
Jul

Mikeware backs OUYA Console

Mikeware backs the OUYA game console as an Elite Developer. Look for original Mikeware games on the console in March 2013!

19
Aug

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.

9
Apr

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.

14
Dec

[HD Intros] Suitor 2 for WP7

Find out more about Suitor 2 in this lovely HD video also showcasing the fabulous Samsung Focus.