Some days ago a submitted my "PopTheBubble" game to Silverlight.net. I thought it would be a great source of inspiration, as this game is the outcome of a hands-on-lab tutorial from silverlight.net.

At the moment you can see it in the Silverlight.net Gallery  

This has been my first "learning" project, both for learning Silverlight 2 but also learning alittle about game development in Silverlight 2. Learning/getting started projects like this normally doesn't have the most sweet code and structure, which is why I haven't published the source code for it.

I got my first "game" finished today. I added a WebService to the project, to save scores in an XML file. As this is my first Silverlight project, it is very bad/ugly coded and structured, which is why I won't publish the source code for this.

Gameplay 

The gameplay is very simple. You need to pop (by moving the needle into the bubble) as many bubbles as you can within 30 seconds. You don't need to click to pop the bubble, just move the mouse(needle) over it. 

Play! 

I still have some issues with my host. They managed to get my blog up gain, which is good. Sadly I am now having some issues with running Silverlight applications, due to isses with MIME-types. This worked without any problems before they managed to pull my site down.

Silverlight MIME-type information 

To run silverlight applications on your host, you need to setup two MIME-Types:

Extension: .xap
Content Type: application/x-silverlight-app

Extension: .xaml
Content Type: application/xaml+xml

This doesn't work now and you therefore can't run the silverlight sample on my site. I hope my host will get this fixed soon!

UPDATE: Finally they managed to fix the problem. So the silverlight applications on my site is now running again. 

Due to some issues at my host, some of my websites, including Laumania.net has been down for some days. Laumania.net seems to be up and running again now, but there is still some issues with some of my other sites.

During my down time, I were investegating the possiblities of hosting my sites from home. I have a ok connection and computer to run as a server, no problem there. My biggest problem is email hosting. I don't want to run my own email server, as I can't be sure to have a 100 % uptime here at home. This is accepable for a website, if it's down a little while from time to time. But email can't be down, as I will loose emails then. 

A solution to this could be Google Apps. I tryed it out yesterday, and it seems to work great! I used laumania.net as my first test domain, and it runs nicely!

First you have to create an account with a domain. Then you have to verify that you own the domain. After that you have to do some DNS changes for your domain, and then you are running. So all emails to my laumania.net domain now is recieved by google and put into my "semi" gmail account. 

Read more about how it's working on the link above. 

In one of the "Hands on labs" on Silverlight.net, there is a "PopTheBubble" game tutorial, that teach you how to use MouseEvents in Silverlight 2. At the end he writes that you can try implementing some new features your self.

I did that to get around Silverlight alittle more. At the moment, you can only "pop" bubbles and it counts how many you popped, that's it. You never wins or dieds, pretty boring. I have plans to implement a small game logic and hi-score this week, if I get time to it. The goal of the game should be to pop as many bubbles as possible within a teimframe, 30 sec. ex. After that, if you score it good enough, you will be put on a hi-score with your name.

Try it out here: http://silverlight.laumania.net/bubble/