Category Archives: Games

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Splatting 2D blood in games built with MonoGame (Featured Article – Windows Phone)

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This week we are featuring two articles. One of them is Splatting 2D blood in games built with MonoGame by this_is_ridiculous.

If you are a hard core mobile game developer, I’m sure the title of the article would interest you. This week’s featured article is about developing 2D action games on Windows Phone – games that include shooting, fighting and more importantly blood :-)

“If you develop a 2D action game there is likely to be tons of shooting, sword fighting, maiming and killing: if you want it to be properly dark and gory you’ll need to be able to add buckets of blood to your scenes, and you will want this blood to stay in the level for as long as possible. That’s exactly the same situation we (me and my team-mates) are now in – while developing an engine for our new game we came to the point that we need the blood splatters to stay on the level.” Read more

This article illustrates an important aspect of developing 2D action games – blood spatting.  The article contains a buildable example and covers drawing texture maps (decals), shaders and how to keep track of decals.

Read the article and let us know about your action games on Windows Phone.

Getting Started with Unity 3D on Windows Phone (Featured Article)

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This week’s featured article is Getting Started with Unity 3D on Windows Phone by roguecode.

Unity 3D is an engine and tools which make it very easy to create cross-platform 3D games. This article demonstrates how to get started with Unity 3D on Windows Phone with a code example.

The example discussed in the article creates a simple scene where a ball bounces around, as shown in the above video. The article shows you the basics of setting up the project, and then demonstrate how to fire events in a Unity3D C# script, and react to that in your Windows Phone project code.

Read the article and let us know how you like it!

Battle Tank (Featured Project)

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BattleTankIcon This week we have chosen Battle Tank as our Featured Project by Nokia Developer team. A Java ME based tank game which showcases the usage of sprites, tiles etc. along-with covering some ‘crucial’ points which should be kept in consideration while developing a gaming project for Java ME.

BattleTankImgA           BattleTankImgB

The game’s main objective remains the destruction of enemy tanks & defend its base alongside giving the user the option to choose between various kinds of tanks, jumping to larger levels etc. The project, which is very well explained in its Wiki also proves very useful for the people who wanting to implement ‘In App purchase’ feature in their apps which is a part of its latest version. Undoubtedly the project is quite popular amongst the developers which is evident from its download numbers.

Lastly, we would like to thank all the people associated with the project & moreover hoping to see its Windows Phone version in the near future.

- Vineet Jain (on behalf, Projects Moderation team)

Fullscreen XNA games on Windows Phone 8 devices (Featured Article)

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This week’s featured article is Fullscreen XNA games on Windows Phone 8 devices by to_pe.

Fullscreen XNA applications actually work as expected on devices with 1280×768 resolution – they fill the whole screen. This is due to the built in hardware scaler which automatically scales up image to the real resolution.

However, when running fullscreen XNA applications on devices with 1280×720 resolution, there are black bars on either side of the screen. This means it’s difficult to support WP8 devices when creating fullscreen apps with XNA. This article explains how to create such apps that will run correctly on all Windows Phone 8 devices.

This article is the 7th winner of our promotion to award a PDP membership and Lumia 800 to Featured Article Winners

Let us know how you like the article in the comments.

MonoGame on Windows Phone 8 Post-Processing Your Game (Featured Article)

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MonoGame on Windows Phone 8 Post-Processing Your Game by this_is_ridiculous

Water.png

When you develop a game, at some point, you start thinking about adding special effects to your graphics pipeline. Doing this is beneficial for several reasons:

  • For having effects that cannot be created by an artist (refraction, reflection, water effects)
  • For setting additional mood for a gameplay (bloom, blur, filter effects)
  • For making your games just look cooler (all sorts of distortion effects)

This article explains how to compile and use shaders with MonoGame on Windows Phone 8 for post-processing.

Car Trumps (Featured Project)

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projecticonCar Trumps is Windows Phone 8 card game for children. This game leverages the use of NFC technology to communicate between two Windows Phone 8 devices. In this game user choose the best feature of a random car and compares the same category to its friend’s car by touching both the devices, and the winner gets both the cards.

car-trumps-main-view car-trumps-card-view

This  application demonstrate the use of ProximityDevice API to transfer data between two devices over the NFC.  The classes, code shipper and the protocol used in this application are noted in project wiki. If you are looking for more information and demo examples on Windows Phone NFC then Opening sockets with NFC could be a good starting point for you.

– Somnath Banik (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

Coltran Studios: Powered by Windows Phone (Featured Video)

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When Simon Jäger, a developer, met Jason Zielinski, an artist, amazing things started to happen. They formed Coltran Studios, perhaps the world’s smallest international game studio, based in Sweden and Chicago. Learn how the two brought their ‘Cradle to the Grave’ mobile game to Windows Phone. Says Zielinski: ‘This is real, this is amazing, this is brilliant’.

Read more about creating your Windows Phone 8 games for Nokia Lumia:http://www.developer.nokia.com/windowsphone

Optimising Series 40 Web Apps for speed by eliminating server round trips (Featured Article)

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Optimising Series 40 Web Apps for speed by eliminating server round trips by lorion84

This article explains how to write a highly responsive Series 40 Web App by avoiding server calls after initial load. It uses a Minesweeper clone as example.

Minesfinder-3.png

The article was picked as one of the winners under the Asha Touch Competition 2012Q3.

SheepClock for WindowsPhone (Featured Project)

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SheepClock for WindowsPhone by spiretos(Spyridon Antonellos) is a clock and alarm scheduler application created using both Silverlight and XNA. The application brings an attraction on a little Sheep that runs and jumps over the fence again and again. It also has a nice set of themes and adjusts with the device accent color to make it more personalized.

The application demonstrates the use of both Silverlight and XNA in the same page along with IsolatedStorage, StoryBoards, handling infinite game loop and many more game elements.  If you are a WindowsPhone lover this application could be one of your learning tutorials.

– Somnath Banik (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)

Cocos2D-x for Qt (Featured Project of the Month September 2012)

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project iconCocos2D-x for Qt is an open-source mobile 2D game framework. It is a port to Qt of the Cocos2d-x open-source C++ mobile 2D game framework (which was in turn ported from the original cocos2d-iphone project).

We featured this project for a week back in May, but because it is now feature-complete, and also one of the most useful gaming APIs for Qt we’re now featuring it for the whole month of September.

The project, which makes it very much easier to write mobile games for Qt platforms, has now made its first candidate release (1.0). It delivers a feature-complete version for Qt and has been verified on Symbian Anna and Belle devices (Qt 4.7.4, Qt Mobility 1.2.1) and the Nokia N9 (MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan).

There is good documentation on the wiki, including a porting guide and a tutorial for the JumpingGame example. A short video of JumpingGame is shown below:

The project team are responsive to discussions and suggestions, so you if get stuck, just ask!

– Hamish Willee (on behalf of the Projects Moderation team)