Fun Silverlight Game: Crayon Cannon
Jul 21, 2008
Kudos to the Popfly team for adding new features in their July update. My favorite features are the pre-loading of assets which will pre-load images, audio, video before a game starts so it doesn’t lag out and the **High Score **service. The full list of features can be found on the Popfly Team blog. Crayon Cannon If you haven’t played this game, stop what you’re doing and give it a try.…more
Bioware Knights of the Old Republic MMO Coming!
Jul 17, 2008
Woohoo! From Joystiq, Bioware has officially spilled the beans that they are building a MMO based on the Knights of the Old Republic game. The first KOTOR game was amazing, clearly one of the best Xbox games ever and an amazing twist at the end…in short, a masterpiece. Hotness! Here are the notes from the Future of MMO’s panel in February at GDC that included Ray Muyzka from Bioware
New Popfly Game Creator Features
Jun 18, 2008
Adam Nathan recently blogged about some of the new features they’ve added to Popfly Game Creator including the color swapper for skinning actors, guidelines and snapping for aligning characters, actor stamping for easier tiling, new events, and the ability to clone a level! All-in-all, this should make building games using Popfly even easier. Check out Adam’s post for the full details.
Coding4Fun Talk at TechEd
Jun 11, 2008
At TechEd this year, I gave what can only be described as an overly ambitious talk given I only had 45 minutes: **Coding4Fun: **The Secrets to Programming YouTube, iTunes, Microsoft Zune, Windows Vista Peer-to-Peer APIs, and Even World of Warcraft I say overly ambitious as YouTube, Vista P2P, and Warcraft could easily have been dedicated 75 minute sessions so covering all of them enough to be meaningful in 45 minutes was….…more
AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft V2 in the works
May 14, 2008
I recently posted a high-level feature specification for version 2.0 of AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft on the projects Wiki which you can check out here. **Note: **If you’re new to Warcraft programming or are interested in getting started, I highly recommend getting World of Warcraft Programming: A Guide and Reference for Creating WoW Addons (Wiley Page) my full 5/5 star review is here. Better yet, Gabor Ratky sent me some sneak peek screenshots of the new features in builds and it’s very cool stuff.…more
Popfly Game Creator Alpha Launches!
May 02, 2008
Popfly Game Creator Alpha launches today and It’s amazing. Kudos to Adam Nathan as he’s really shown how Silverlight can build incredibly rich applications. I can only imagine what he’ll do when Popfly moves to Silverlight 2! Here’s the Channel 9 interview with Adam building three Popfly games from scratch * Here’s how difficult it was to make games before Popfly While Popfly Game Creator is designed for non-developers, I’m sure many developers will also want to have fun with it, so here’s my quick explanation of Popfly for .…more
Session Notes: Life on the Bungie Farm: Fun Things to do with 180 servers and 350 processors
Feb 22, 2008
**Speakers: **Luis Villegas, Sean Shypula from Bungie Distributed client/server system split up, runs it in parallel * processes user submitted tasks in parallel * 180 rackmounted machines 300 processes * can use * Advantages speed up time consuming tasks - (rendering goes from day to a few hours) * see results of work more frequently which means more iteration which enables adding more polish * Automates complex processes and reduces human error, ( * click a button and get email when job is complete Main processes on the farm…more
Panel: Future of MMOs
Feb 21, 2008
**Speakers: ** MC of event, Jon Wood - Managing Editor MMORPG.com * Jack Emmert - Founder, Cryptic Studios, Champions Online, City of Heroes/Villans * One other person, Mark Jacobs or “Matt” from Cryptic * Ray Muzyka - General Manager of Bioware, haven’t released one yet * Min Kim - Free-to-play, Cart Rider, * Rob Pardo - SVP of Game Design at Blizzard, Lead designer of WoW Format: Panel and audience questions…more
Session: Star Wars, The Force Unleashed
Feb 21, 2008
**Full Title: **Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: How LucasArts is Building a Game Development Team and a Technology Pipeline…at the same time Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a new, upcoming title **Storyline: **Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, between episodes 3 and 4 Designing the Game Big 5 questions - What’s the story, what thing is going to always be fun (using force powers) * unchecked ambitions * Concept art - Lots of images and they’re beautiful, some landscapes look like Wow’s Outland concept art * Pre-Vis work * Rapid prototyping - If I had to do it again, I would have devs prototyping gameplay planning and scope - Add a step to milestones to cut off scope - we shot for the moon, it was too hard, make it decreasing scope a part of every milestone.…more
Top 10 Interesting Nuggets from the Microsoft GDC Keynote
Feb 21, 2008
The US video game industry revenue is now $18 Billion and continues to grow. 2. Games have not only surpassed the movie industry, they have also surpassed the music industry (source: Jupiter Research) 3. 7 different Xbox titles sold over 1MM units in the 2007 holiday season 4. Xbox has the highest number of games rated > 80 by Metacritic 5.…more