OBS: This blog post is in Danish, just in case you didn’t see it :)

Efter min talk på ITU omkring spiludvikling i Silverlight, blev jeg kontaktet  af Søren fra ANUG.dk som spurgte om jeg kunne være interesseret i at deltage i en podcast omkring emnet. Dette takkede jeg selvfølgelig ja til og resultatet er nu at finde på anug.dk

ANUGCast #71 Spiludvikling med Mads Laumann del 1 af 2

2. del kommer i næste uge, so stay tuned :)

- Enjoy!

About two weeks ago I wrote this post about how we decided to try and change the focus on how we develop this game. We have for a long time coded on the “engine” part of the game, so we have something solid to build the game on. This is very exciting and very needed, we just started to hit a point where we felt like we needed to have something we could “show” people. We needed to have a simple “playable” prototype of the game that we could show people and they could try. There were mainly two reasons for this:

1. We were starting to have a hard time finding the motivation to code on the project, as all the things we did were “non-visual”, like all the engine work, which didn’t gave anything to the game, visually or game play-wise. Motivation is a pretty important factor when you are doing a hobby project like this :)
2. We are both (me and Allan Hansen) very interesting in designing code as good as possible, which is why we usually talk a lot of how we can do stuff before we start coding it. This actually a good thing, but in this case, we saw that we needed a different approach.

So, with the points from above in mind, we wanted to do something about it, which is what we did the last two weeks.

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As I mentioned on my last post, another developer (Allan Hansen) have joined the project. We have done a lot of work in getting a pretty solid foundation/engine to build the game on. Not that it’s “done”, far from, but we have something now that should save us time in the long run. This means that we have invested a lot of time in getting this done, without actually getting forward with the actual game play.

Now, after the project have been on hold for some time, we have started up again, this time with a changed focus. We will now focus more on getting implemented the different features of the game, instead of keep building on the foundation/engine (non visual stuff). This way we can see progress as the game play will evolve, both our self, but also when we show the game to others. This way we can start pretty soon to get feedback from people, even though the game is young.

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Bill Reiss over at Silverlight Games 101 did a great video about game development in Silverlight. He provides source and slide show too. If you haven’t already seen it, go do it.

See Bill’s post here: Video – Overview of Silverlight Game Development

I’m playing around with the Farseer Physics Engine these days and needed to draw the “collision boundaries”. These are called Geom (Geometries) in Farseer language and these are made up by Vertices.
Cameron Albert have already made code to do this and I have already used it in my Farseer Physics Simple Samples so that were an easy one.

Then I ran into some problems/confusion with the “position” of elements. Basically it was due to that Farseer’s position is at the center of an element, whereas Silverlight’s version of position is at the top left corner. This is actually not that confusing as it is written here, but it can quickly become pretty confusing, at least I think :)

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