Finally I got “Balloon Mayhem” finished. I still have ideas for improvements, but I have decided (for now at least) that I will release the game as it is now, else I will just keep changing the game all the time. Instead I will leave Balloon Mayhem for now and start up my “Little Longhorn” project again.
For the people interested in “Little Longhorn” I can tell that that project have been put on hold while I finished “Balloon Mayhem”. As I done with that now, I can get back to “Little Longhorn” now, which I’m really looking forward too.
I want to thank all the people helping out with this game, one way or the other, and please see the “Credits” part in game for more info on this.
Here are some screenshots. To play the game, click on it in the menu to the left.
In my current game (Balloon Mayhem) I needed to pick a random color from an predefined list of colors. The way I solved this were to make an string[] of the colors as hex values (ex. #FF000000 for black) and then just pick a random index into this array each time a need a new color. My problem were to convert the hex values, in string format, to a real .NET Color. I Googled it a little and found some articles about generating brushes this way. I just altered the code a little and got this one:
private Color GetColorFromHexa(string hexaColor)
{
return Color.FromArgb(
Convert.ToByte(hexaColor.Substring(1, 2), 16),
Convert.ToByte(hexaColor.Substring(3, 2), 16),
Convert.ToByte(hexaColor.Substring(5, 2), 16),
Convert.ToByte(hexaColor.Substring(7, 2), 16));
}
Feel free to use it :)
- Enjoy!
I have now answered a couple of thread on http://silverlight.net about graphics in Silverlight and sprite animation this week. Therefore I thought I might also as well, post the same links here on my blog. Actually I think I have posted all of the links on my blog before, but here they are together in the same post.
Frame-based animation using clipping
For games, the typical animation style is "frame based" animations. This can been archived in Silverlight using "clipping". Bill Reiss over at Bluerosegames.com, have created a pretty good article about how to do this:
http://www.bluerosegames.com/silverlight-games-101/post/Frame-Based-Sprite-Animation-in-Silverlight.aspx
Principles of basic animation in Silverlight
At MIX09 Jeff Paries had a pretty good session about "Principles of basic animation in Silverlight". He shows different ways of doing animation and some basic physics (using vectors to simulate gravity)
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T12F
Deep dive into Silverlight graphics
When doing graphic intensive stuff in Silverlight, like games, it's good to know something about how the graphics pipeline in Silverlight works. Seema Ramchandani had a good session about this at MIX09.
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T17F
Hope this help you in the right direction
- Enjoy!
The other day I read Jeff Weber's blogpost about GameJolt.com. I decided to give the site a go and signed up. The site seems pretty good and supports much more than just Silverlight games, even though Silverlight is the most important one ;). It also have a Ad revenue plan coming up, so don't wait on putting your games up there, it's really easy, trust me. I just put up Bubbles and a branch of it I made, which is perfectly playable, I just never got further with it. I call that branch Bubbles Reflex. The "reflex" is actually because I had this idea of a "reflex indicator" to put in the game. I did that, and here you can try it out. As I didn't find it to work really well, gameplay-wise, I cancelled that branch of the game.
Back to the actual site - GameJolt.com. The site works great as far as I have tryed it out. Upload of Silverlight games are great and simple. Initially I had a problem with the size of my game. I then wrote to the developer of the site via the chat in the button of every page, and after a day it were fixed.
So, if you have one or more Silverlight games already on the net, why don't put it up on this one :)
- Enjoy!
For a long time, I have wanted to create a Silverlight Tower Defense game, inspired by the Playstation 3 game - "Monsters". 
At the same time, I have wanted to try out "learn/develop in public" like Rob Conery did/do with the "MVC Storefront". I just never had a project suitable for this.
Little Longhorn is a Silverlight Tower Defense "Indian style" game (By "Indian" I mean indians and cowboys - western you could say). It's inspired by the PixelJunk Monsters game and I want to develop it "in public". The only thing I know about the game, at this point, is that it's going to be similar to "Monsters", have an "Indian theme" and that I will try to document my progress by doing blog posts and video casts.
Video casts
As stated, I will try to document my progress similar to what Rob Conery did/do with the MVC Storefront (today known as "Kona"). Rob's videos seems very polished and well structured, I will try to do that too, but don't expect big road maps, powerpoints, diagrams etc. I do this as a hobby project, so I will try to use the limited time I have as effective as possible. Mainly the videoes will be "by developers for developers", so all the fancy-stuff might be missing from time to time, if it doesn't directly help me prove my point. The main purpose I'm going to do these video casts about the project, is to be able, hopefully in a easy and simple way, to share my thought, ideas etc with you, the viewer/reader. Hopefully I will learn a lot from your feedback and hopefully you will learn about how, or how not, to build a game in Silverlight. Your feedback is really valued as it will help drive the development, so please don't stay back - just leave a comment.
One of the major downsides by "learning/developing in public" is the risk of total failure! This project might never get finished or may stall half way for some reason. I can't know that now, just like I don't know anything else about this project right now. That's the hole idea :)
But lets start with the first part in this, hopefully, long series of video cast about "Little Longhorn".
Note: After recording the video I can see that I walk pretty fast over collision detection, gameloop, interfaces, gameobject, relation between View and Model etc. The purpose of this video were to give a quick overview/intro to the code, the project and the thoughts behind. Please let me know if you would like videoes about these parts in particular.
Here are links to some of the blogs and sites I talk about in the video:
http://blog.wekeroad.com/category/mvc-storefront/page/2/
http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd569746.aspx
http://www.farseergames.com/blog/2009/4/30/we-are-bugs-refactored-and-source-released.html
http://pixeljunk.jp/library/Monsters/
http://lostgarden.com/2009/03/dancs-miraculously-flexible-game.html
PS: Bear with me, this is my first video cast :)
- Enjoy!