19th November 2010

I picked up a Windows Phone 7 the other day.  Still working out the nuances of it, but first impressions are pretty positive.  There are a couple of nigling doubts, but as they say, where theres a problem, there’s an opportunity.

Microsoft have provided quite and easy to use tool kit for the development of WP7 apps and games, so it looks like I’ll be able to build in some of the functionality I have, in the past, taken for granted.

In addition, I’m thinking of porting the Pengu code to WP7.  Will let you know how this goes…

4th May 2010

In a stunning effort in explaining to a colleague the benefits of CSS, I inadvertadly removed the contents of my stylesheet, which I then suddenly found out was a big no-no in Wordpress as the stylesheet holds the meta-data for the theme.  As such I can no longer manage the theme through wordpress.  So until I can get home to manually upload my stylesheet to the server I have reverted back to the original style design, which is inheritely flawed.

Oh well, hopefully I’ll remember that little tid-bit for the future.

No games development news to speak of.  Aching to get back into it but struggling to find the time and motivation.  In the mean time, I suggest everyone who reads this to go annoy Pocket Watch Games into releasing Monaco.

EDIT: Fixed now, all is well.

20th December 2009

Finally back at working on Pengu.  This time I spent a couple of hours fixing up the collision detection between in game objects to register enemies being bopped on the head.  Looks a little bit shifty at the moment until I nail down the enemy death animations, but I’m glad it actually works.  Now Pengu has gameplay!  I’m hoping to get a few days in over the Holidays to add the music and sound engine.  Then it’s down to designing the levels, creating the art assets and fixing up bugs.  I’m hoping to have a demo out early next year for testing.

31st July 2009

Another day on the project has led us to finally attempt an Xbox 360 conversion of the Pengu Engine.  After 4 hours of effort, it was up and running 100% on a 720p display over the Xbox 360.

A word of warning to those that are storing XML in their XNB compilations, the .Net Compact Framework has limited stream reader capability.  In Pengu’s case, we were storing game and level details in XML through the ContentTypeWriter.  This resulted in an inability to read it in using the Compact Framework’s Stream Reader due to a lack of seeking functionality.  We got around this by creating our XNB compilations in the correct manner, through Binary streaming.

I’m happy to provide the end code for our Game and Level data Custom Content Processors that worked on the 360 should you but ask.

26th July 2009

I suppose it’s about time to release a screen shot of the engine.  Obviously it doesn’t look anything special, but it does show some of our progress to date.  The sprites are stock sprites that will not be used in the final game.