XNA

> Hey everyone, wow ok so first of all it’s been a long time since my last post, I keep telling myself I need to return to do more regular posts, but twitter kinda replaced it in many ways for my daily-rambles. However I’ve been trying to work on something new and gotta get back to more regular blogging, but more on that later. Second, but not least important, Vizati is turning 10 years old today (11 June 2010), feels only yesterday we (me coding and Rita with the art) were doing the first puzzles and trying to figure out the best way for making this a fun game....

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.

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....

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....

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....

Note: 22/04/2013 – Due to popular request I made an article about achieving this effect in OpenGL Independent Resolution Rendering?? What’s this all about? Basically a way of not caring what you resolution is. Ever had Gui elements misplaced because you changed the resolution? Or getting out of the screen? If you are doing a game on Xna just for Xbox360 you can basically use a 1280×720 base resolution and the Xbox will scale the game for you making the proper Letterbox....

So I was watching Microsoft Mix10 and while talking about the new Windows Phone 7 Series, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. What? But like now now? I went to http://developer.windowsphone.com/ and XNA Creator’s Club and there it was. The packages contains: A CTP of the new Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Tools and framework to develop Windows Phone applications and games with Silverlight A CTP of XNA Game Studio 4....

Rita and I have been working on a demo for entering Dream Build Play competition and today she has finally finished the teaser for Vizati. It’s our game for entering the Dream Build Play 2010 competition and XNA Pizza Night. We started working on this around 3 weeks ago so it’s still an early draft from our vision of the game. Vizati is a puzzle game made by Different Pixel for Dream Build Play 2010 in which you need to connect the little vizati stones by color....

It’s been a long week. Even though I’ve always pointed to a make a very simple game for Dream Build Play so that I may actually have the time to finish it I just lost almost two day doing something to show for about 3 or 4 seconds per level. Discussing how we should make our puzzle appear and disappear between each level we decided that a particle system or an effect of such nature would be nice to show apart from some fading or something on the puzzle itself....

Well the title is an Homage to James Silva‘s I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 I’ve been really busy with my Dream Build Play game lately. Although being a simple game somethings always turn out to be harder that we initial think. I’ve been debating myself with some bugs on my engine, had to redo tons of code yesterday due to XBOX360 compatibilities (should have tested earlier :P). Two days ago Rita started doing the assets and it’s looking really good....

One of the things I realized is very handy when prototyping or debugging is to draw a line on a specific location. Like drawing lines around collision boxes to see if your character is making a proper collision. For my games I’ve made a small LineBatch. Basically LineBatch uses a SpriteBatch to draw the lines by stretching a 1×1 white Texture2D to your line size. You can give it 2 points ( start and end point of course) and a color....

I know there’s lot’s of this stuff over the internet but I keep bumping into people asking for this. A way to easily switch from a Game Screen to a Menu or Options without having tons of flags and “if” clauses on the class Game. I’ve made a small project with a Screen Manager. The ScreenManager is static and can contain Screens. Instead of having typical Draw Update functions drawing SpriteBatches on the Game class we should have something like this:...