Games and systems from childhood

I think the first game I ever played was Tetris on a 286 if my memory isn’t failing me. My father worked at restaurant nearby a small apartment rental office, one of the dudes that worked there occasionally would let me play. I remember one day he had this new game, Prince of Persia, my chin just fell, awesome, I thought games couldn’t get any better. I remember always asking him to “type the code to play” as I called it, since it was DOS based....

August 8, 2010 · 3 min · 614 words · David Amador

What are your target platforms for games?

I decided to run a little poll to track what platforms do you target as a game developer. I think this should be interesting. Please share this post link or the direct link to the poll (http://twtpoll.com/dar51l) so that we can have more accurate results. The poll closes in about 6 days and you can select various options of course.

July 26, 2010 · 1 min · 60 words · David Amador

Fixing dark borders sprites on iPhone

I ran into this issue a couple hours ago working on the iPhone sdk: See the darker borders around the image? It’s a png image and that’s was supposed to be a gradient of alpha. So why am I getting this strange stuff around it? Well that’s because that alpha isn’t 0 or 1 or 0 or 255. The first thing I found out is that XCode grabs the png images and multiplies the RGB component with the alpha....

July 26, 2010 · 2 min · 278 words · David Amador

Instance based Callbacks in C++

One of the things that was probably forgotten but the dudes who made C++ standard were callbacks, there’s no out of the box solution for Instance based Callbacks, just for functions. When I moved to C# I was really happy with the way delegates work, it’s simple, easy and most of all, it works. On game development one of the things callbacks are usually used is for Buttons, you have a menu and want to attribute a function to each button....

July 14, 2010 · 2 min · 296 words · David Amador

Developing on Mac and Basalt running on the iPhone

It’s been around two weeks since my last post. Basically because I’ve been busy porting my engine Basalt to iPhone/iPad. If you follow me on twitter you might have known this already since I ranted pretty much at start, moving platform and language is always painful if you are used to other conventions/shortcuts etc. So it all started with my wish to port Vizati to the iPhone, since the game is already running on PC, Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7 one can only wish for an easy and quick port since pretty much all base code is done....

July 9, 2010 · 4 min · 688 words · David Amador

We need XBOX Live Indie Games in Portugal!!

See the little black country on the map? It’s Portugal. The green zone are countries around Portugal that have XBOX Live Indie Games. We are surrounded by countries that can place their games on Creator’s Club but we were left behind. I won’t say there aren’t many others but they can speak for themselves. I’m tired of watching developers from other countries being able to place their games there and we have to sit and watch....

June 22, 2010 · 1 min · 198 words · David Amador

Making a XNA Game Installer

I am going to start with a little rant about Visual Studio default Installer, you know, the one you can make for yout XNA games inside VS. Ugly and not very handy, sure it installs every dependency but doesn’t leave many options like….hum…I don’t know choosing the location where you want to install? Moving along…I discovered this little cool installer called InnoSetup, and best of all it’s free. InnoSetup has different ways of you building a proper installer but I am going to cover the script way, much more control....

June 9, 2010 · 4 min · 783 words · David Amador

Who wants to try Vizati Demo?

Ok, I know I’ve been making far too much posts about Vizati but this time it’s for a good reason, anyone interested in trying out the game can do it…right about NOW… http://www.differentpixel.com/2010/06/vizati-demo-available/ Also on a quick update, yesterday I had the chance to test Vizati at Windows Phone 7 Developer’s Hub on a real WP7 device, which was awesome. I want to thank João Antão, Nuno Costa, Ben Riga and Neil Hutson for the opportunity....

June 8, 2010 · 1 min · 100 words · David Amador

A good Reference system can help your game

How many times has it happened where you have this one class, let’s say it’s a spaceship that was destroyed. Now you have tell all other dependent objects that she died, any independent sprite animation class, AI, etc etc because they were relying on her. Another thing is, in my case, having a scene that contains all the objects and by deleting the ship It won’t get removed from the scene, keeping the reference alive and so Garbage collector won’t kick in....

June 6, 2010 · 2 min · 406 words · David Amador

Yay, my first Game as Indie Developer is almost out

No, I’m not dead….yet… It’s just that I’ve been stuck on Different Pixel development dungeon for the past weeks finishing and polishing (bug hunting) my first game, Vizati. Most of you have been following the process and asking things every since we showed the beta version at XNA Pizza Night, after which we decided to finish the game and try to sell it to see how it goes. Three months later and here I am, making the final touches on the game before it’s release on 11th June....

May 26, 2010 · 2 min · 249 words · David Amador

Vizati on Windows Phone 7

It’s been awhile since my last post. I’ve been utterly busy so I haven’t had the time for any tutorials. This week I got an invitation from João Antão to showcase Vizati as part of his XNA Framework presentation. This occurred during the Imagine Cup final on Portugal. I’ve been playing with the WP7 tools and I decided to try and port Vizati to XNA 4.0 and give it a try on the emulator so I could show all 3 versions running simultaneous....

May 7, 2010 · 2 min · 311 words · David Amador

Making Big Grass Tiled Backgrounds in XNA

I’ve seen this quite a bit around on XNA forums and got 2 emails last week asking about this: I want to make a 3000×3000 grass background by tiling this small grass image I have. Should I make one big image or should I make a for cycle drawing the image (3000/TileSize) times? My answer is neither of them. The big image has a huge impact on every Draw and more, you are limiting your map to the max Texture Size the graphic card can handle....

April 19, 2010 · 2 min · 308 words · David Amador