Oh, it’s been a while since I have written anything about Little Longhorn! Actually I just discovered that my last post is from 1. February 2010, so that is pretty crazy how fast times goes by. :)
Even though I haven’t written anything about the game a lot have actually happened. In this post I will take you through some of the things we have done these months.

What you see in the middle is our new RadialWheel menu component.

More...

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

The 16. Dec. 2009 I did a talk about game development in Silverlight 3 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Thanks to all the people showing up, hope you had some good hours too :)

One thing that I found especially cool were that one of the attendees was a 10-12 year old boy (he brought his dad of course :) ). He already did a game in Game Maker he told me, very cool!
To the dad of this boy: I told you about some “kids programming language” that I couldn’t remember the name of. I goggled it this morning and found it: http://phrogram.com/kpl.aspx it might be a good start into the world of programming.
The other thing I told you about were GarageGames, take a look at this it comes with a WYSIWYG-like IDE, but it also have it’s own scripting language (similar to javascript) that you can code in. For more info take a look at it here: http://www.torquepowered.com/products/torque-2d

Slides and demos
I have put up the 4 demos, 1 Physics Helper demo for Blend and the powerpoint file, all in a zip file which can be downloaded from here: http://laumania.net/downloads/GameDevelopmentInSilverlight.zip

For the ones who are interested here is the list of, more or less game related, blogs/persons I read/follow.

• http://www.farseergames.com/blog/
• http://www.cameronalbert.com/
• http://blogs.silverarcade.com/silverlight-games-101/
• http://www.andybeaulieu.com/
• http://blogs.silverlight.net/blogs/msnow/default.aspx – The book we talked about is written by this guy, Mike Snow, read more here
• http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/52.aspx

Again I would like to thank people who came and hope you found my talk interesting and learned something.

- Enjoy and marry xmas :)

My conversion of the XNA starter kit to Silverlight, using SilverSprite, have been accepted into the Silverlight Community Gallery. This is really great and I hope it helps somebody out there. You can view it and download the source from the link above.

You can see my original post about the conversion here: http://laumania.net/post/Porting-XNA-starter-kit-Platformere2809d-to-Silverlight-(SilverSprite).aspx

- Enjoy!

I read this post by Bill Reiss the other day and found out about this marketplace thing that Xbox have. (I don't have an Xbox myself so didn't knew anything about the community actually. I have a PS3). After reading this, I got a little interested in XNA and thereby SilverSprite, as I can see potential in this new “Xbox Live Independent Games” thing. I haven't done any XNA or SilverSprite before, only knew very little about both.
So, I decided to take a look at it as it might be interesting to do my current game in XNA and Silverlight. So I started to do a little research.

First I started by follow be beginning of this guide and eventually got Xna game studio 3.1 installed. Then I downloaded the latest changeset for SilverSprite (which supported silverlight 3), so I had the source for that on my pc.
I created an default xna windows project 3.1, so I had something to try things on. The code that comes with this default project were pretty easy to understand and I quickly made a small "game" where a sprite were sliding around the screen and pressing the space button changed the background color. Pretty simple and easy. I got that working in Silverlight using SilverSprite pretty fast, so I thought I needed something a little more complex.

I saw that Xna Game Studio 3.1 comes with a starter kit “Platformer”, so I decided to give that a try. After about 4 hours I had a playable version of “Platformer” running in Silverlight and Windows with the exact same code base – wow! At first 4 hours might sound like much to you, but I needed to change stuff in the Platformer game code and in the SilverSprite core to make this work and if you keep in mind that I haven’t worked with either Xna or SilverSprite before, I think it pretty fast :)

Play
You can try out the game here (Warning: It’s the same assets as in the XNA version, so the game is about 9 MB) : http://silverlight.laumania.net/platformer/

Source
You can get the entire source from here: http://silverlight.laumania.net/platformer/platformer1.zip

Keep in mind that to be able to build the source, you need Xna Game Studio 3.1 and Silverlight 3 Tools installed.

To see all the things I have changed/implemented search for “laumania” in the entire solution. I have made minor comments. The SilverSprite version in this source, is a modified one as stated. I have submitted the changes as patches to the SilverSprite, so they will be in the original source too soon I guess.

My experience of using Xna and SilverSprite were actually really good and I decided to give my current project a try in Xna and SilverSprite :)

- Enjoy!