So another year has come to an end, time to make plans for a new one and look back on what has been done. This was one crazy year, where I embraced indie development as my free time “hobby”. This picture illustrates my year very well, dark link is a bonus since my twitter handle is DJ_Link I’m tired, but happy and hoping that these were the first steps on something greater and bigger. Developing Vizati turned out a much more complex task that I imagined, making everything from the ground up, from engine to the actual game for 5 different platforms took me around 3x more time that I expected. Valuables lessons were learned so I’d be a fool to repeat those mistakes again. ...

Yeahhh!!!! Just got an email a couple of hours ago confirming that Vizati for Windows Phone 7 won first prize on Microsoft XapFest. Here’s a link, be warned it’s in Portuguese, although it’s on the Microsoft official webpage I couldn’t figure out how to translate that to English on the website itself. Just use Google translate or so. This is great for us since Vizati has now 2 awards and this time the prizes are a Xbox360 + Kinect and a Windows Phone 7 device. This is really great since I don’t have a device and I can now test the game properly and use it for future games development. The Kinect is also great but I more excited on using it for my own projects that actually playing it (geek). ...

It’s been awhile since my last post. Regular visitors know that for the last months I’ve been working mainly on Vizati, bringing it first from the Xbox360 (never released, no xblig here) to a PC digital release, followed by a complete rewrite of the engine to C++/OpenGL for a iPhone port, next there was the Windows Phone 7 version. I had the iPad on a backburner since I don’t own a device and optimizing code without seeing the result is crappy but about 2 weeks ago it went gold and it’s finished. ...

I’ve been playing with polygons and collisions lately so I decided to share some stuff. Using rectangles to detect if the mouse is inside is handy for Buttons and rectangular shaped objects, but what about other irregular shaped objects? Taking this into account I decided to create a Polygon class that basically has a List of Vector3 points. Although I’m just covering 2D collision you should use Vector3 for a more generic class. ...

Since I’m out of the countries where WP7 Marketplace is available it’s been a real pain to check out new games and most of all if Vizati was already available. Btw it’s out there, go give it a try, there’s a trial mode. It’s great fun 🙂 So searching some forums I found a neat code to check this on the simulator. Basically create a new WP7 Silverlight App and write this main page code ...

UPDATE: Pressure works, Microsoft backs down over XBLIG changes: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/gaming/news/a286779/microsoft-backs-down-over-xblig-changes.html Let me start by saying that this is just a personal opinion, nothing more, nothing less. It was with great sadness that I saw what the latest update to the Xbox360 dashboard did to Xbox Indie Games See? XBLIG is now on the “Speciality Shops”, right next to Avatar Marketplace, not even worthy of being the Games section. Even if you search a XBLIG game there it won’t return any result. ...

For my current project I’ve been working with A* as a path-finding solution. Basically it’s a way to get from point A to point B. This is used for AI in games mostly on tiled based games, It’s very simple to understand and implement. As A* traverses the graph, it follows a path of the lowest known cost, keeping a sorted priority queue of alternate path segments along the way. If, at any point, a segment of the path being traversed has a higher cost than another encountered path segment, it abandons the higher-cost path segment and traverses the lower-cost path segment instead. This process continues until the goal is reached. ...

I don’t usually write reviews about games, maybe mostly because I don’t play as often as I used to. Most games today are just graphics graphics, I use super shader ray-traced lights but I forgot gameplay because I’m a tech demo. I grew up with a Super Nintendo playing Super Mario World and Zelda A Link to the Past, yeah shocker, no Spectrum to me :P, so I’m 2D gameplay type lover. ...

I just discovered this useful piece of code for all who don’t have (including me) any memory leaks tracking code or software. I know there are other and better solution but this can be handy for quick findings without much hassle. First place this code in your entry point file, generally main.cpp inside your main() function #ifdef _DEBUG int flag = _CrtSetDbgFlag(_CRTDBG_REPORT_FLAG); flag |= _CRTDBG_LEAK_CHECK_DF; // Turn on leak-checking bit _CrtSetDbgFlag(flag); #endif Now just run you game/program as you would normally, in debug mode of course. ...

If you read my recent posts you know I’ve been bringing Basalt to C++. The plan is to support both DirectX and OpenGL render API’s and OpenGLES for iOS devices. I’m tired of porting stuff so I want to make a better framework for future projects and I’ll leave the XNA branch for Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7. I really wished I had this before. Since the iPhone branch is stable I move on to making it compatible with Win32 and MacOSX. ...