Hobby Projects

Someone once told me –  real nerds always have some hobby project running – if that is true, I’m a big nerd!

Since 2004 I have always had some kind of hobby project going on. A project that I work on in the evening hours. I simply can’t help myself, I hear or read about some new technology and want to play with it. I have always wanted to create games, so I always create some kind of game with this new technology. I find it easier when the project is a game, makes it all so much more fun.

If you want to see a list of some of my professional project that I did for clients, look at my LinkedIn profile.

Some are Proof Of Concept projects, others more full blown finished projects.

Memrace – iOS, Android and Windows Phone Game

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Memrace is a small memory game. This is my first real Unity3d game – and I really enjoy that game engine, it is just pure awesomeness (at leat most of the time). I am creating this game together with my brother Mikkel.

Read all the blogposts about the development of this game in the developer logs.

Døgnrapport – iOS, Android and Windows Phone App

Døgnrapport collects daily police reports, tweets and crime news. Created in Xamarin for iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

More text will come soon…

Dognrapport.dk

Smalltube – Windows Phone & Windows 8

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As a parent, you know which YouTube videos your kids love, and more importantly, which ones you allow them to watch.
Smalltube let you be in 100% control of what videos they have access to, as you create the playlist of videos they can choose from.

No related videos can be watched, only the videos you picked.

So if your kids love videos on YouTube and you want to be able to let them watch them by themselves, Smalltube is the app for your family.

Download for Windows Phone & Windows 8.

Winner of WOWZApp 2012

In 2012 I won the Microsoft WOWZApp award in Denmark for Smalltube.

WOWZApp-Smalltube

We Are Bugs – XNA

Some weeks ago I came by Jeff Webers (aka Farseer Games) small game “We Are Bugs“. I thought about if this game could be easially ported from browser Silverlight to a Windows Phone app in Silverlight.

It turned out that it was VERY easy to do actually.

Next up I wanted to challenge myself a little, so I set the goal to port “We Are Bugs” to XNA too.

This part was actually also surprisingly easy and lucky for you – I put that whole thing on Github (as I’m also playing around with Github these days).

So go grab the source from Github and see how a Silverlight game could look in XNA.

Plan bee – Windows Phone 7 Game

‘plan bee’ is a casual arcade game for Windows Phone 7, designed to be playable and fun, even when you only got a few minutes to spare.

The game is only available in the Windows Phone marketplace currently.

In May 2011, ‘plan bee’ won 1st place in a Danish Windows Phone app competition, read more here.

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Try out the game on your Windows Phone here – it’s FREE:

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For more information look over at RambukGames.com

Little Longhorn – Xbox Game

Little Longhorn is/was a Tower Defense game for Xbox.
You can read more about it on the official website RambukGames.com – website not up anymore.
It’s developed by Mads Laumann (me), Allan Hansen, Mikkel Laumann and Thomas Jørgensen.


Disclaimer: Old projects!

The following projects are old. I guess they are from before 2008 or so. I just wanted to clear that out – so the following isn’t “What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get“, but more like “What-You-See-Is-What-You-Got-In-2008-Or-So“.

Farseer Physics Simple Samples

When I first started with the Farseer Physics Engine I were pretty challenged by the samples that ships with it. They are actually pretty good, but they are very hard to understand as a newcomer as they reuse a lot of stuff, from sample to sample. This is generally a good thing, but when you are new to the engine, it can be hard to spot what’s needed and what’s not.

farseersimplesamples.png

Then to help my self understand it better I started to create some simple samples, where I kept the lines of code to a minimum and only put in what were absolutely necessary to make it work. This of course meant that code-wise it wasn’t that pretty as I repeat code and don’t use that much inheritance etc. All this was to keep it as simple as possible and as easy to understand as possible.

This ended up becoming the Farseer Physics Simple Samples which I have put on Codeplex.com. From there you can download the source and look through the samples.

DependencyFinder

At work one day I found my self in the need to know which projects referenced a specific assembly in a big web site I worked on. The problem were that the website were constructed in a way, which meant that almost all references between the different projects were made through assembly references, not project references. This meant that I couldn’t just to a right click on a class or method and choose “Find all references”. This only works for all projects in a solution. Which is why I couldn’t use it, as I were using assembly references.  If you don’t know the difference between project reference and assembly reference, let me explain.
In Visual Studio when you go to “Add reference” you can choose to point at an specific assembly (.dll file), in ASP.NET typically in the /bin/ folder, which is a “assembly reference”. You can also choose to point at another project in the current solution, which is a “project reference”.

What DependencyFinder does is that it runs through your hole projects source, you just point it to the root, it then looks in all .csproj files to see which assemblies it referenced. On it’s way through your source it also looks for assemblies. By holding theses two gathered information up against each other, it can tell you about references between them.DependencyFinder1.png

DependencyFinder2.png

Read more about the project, find the source and download the application on the DependencyFinder page at codeplex.com.

WebMonitor

Just like DependencyFinder, WebMonitor were an application I created because I had a specific need for it. At work we had the need to be able to monitor specific web sites/servers as we had a problem with then not responding from time to time. I did some research and couldn’t find a simple desktop application to install that could help me out. So, I created WebMonitor.
WebMonitor is a small desktop application you install, add a monitor per URL you want to keep an eye on, set some rules and press “Start”. Then WebMonitor then runs in the background, minimized to tray and will notify you with a bubble message in the corner if some thing happen.

WebMonitor screenshotScreen2.png

You can find more information, source and the application to install on codeplex on the WebMonitor project page.

January 2010 – I have started on a total rewrite of this application. The UI will be in WPF and it will have some nice new extensibilities so you can make your own plug ins for it easily. The release you download at this point is still the WinForm version which is fully functional. I have no ETA on the new version, just keep an eye on my blog and I’ll let you know :)

Balloon Mayhem

This game is pretty similar to Bubbles in game play, but I spend more time on tuning this one. Actually this game builds on the Bubbles source code. I had a guy draw a clown and some other stuff for this game to make it look and feel more complete. I’m pretty happy with the result, if you see it for what it is, a “waste 3-5 min. casual game”.

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Play the game on SilverArcade.com – Balloon Mayhem

Bubbles Reflex

Another branch of the “Bubbles” series of games. This one never got further than this. It’s playable and have a fullscreen-mode, but hi-score is disabled.

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Play it at GameJolt.com

Bubbles

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. Made in Silverlight 2.0.

Play it on SilverArcade.com

SnakeCharp

A simple Snake-cone I started as I wanted to play around with the SDL.NET media library. Is not finished or very playable, but it’s there, so I put it up here anyway.

See the project page on GoogleCode

Parachute 2.0

This was actually one of the first “real” games i made. The graphics is drawn using GDI+, which makes it perform very bad. It was originally written in .NET 1.1 (C#) but is now converted to .NET 2.0. I learned a lot during the development of this game and its actually pretty funny to play.

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Download
You download a zip file. Just unzip and run the .exe file. Please note that the game can take some time to start, as I have been to smart to access the database directly on startup, so it start out by doing this and you have to wait while it does that. The hiscore MySQL database doesn’t run anymore, so it doesn’t get any response. The game is old and I don’t have the source anymore, so can’t do anything about it :)

Parachute (Torque Game Builder)

At some point in time I were playing around with the Torque Game Builder (TGB) from GarageGames and needed a game to try it out on. I chose to create a “Parachute” clone once again, as I weren’t aiming for a groundbreaking game, just needed something specific to create with the TGB.

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It ended out as some kind of early version of my first Parachute game, at least game play wise. It runs much better as it’s rendered using DirectX I think (can’t really remember), but think TGB uses DIrectX as default. The game play on the other hand, isn’t as “advanced” as in the other version I did of the game in pure .NET. I’m not 100 % sure, but I think I also did the music for this my self.

Download
You download a zip file. Just unzip and run the .exe filer.

AstroMania

After I tried out Torque Game Builder (TGB) on the Parachute game, I thought I wanted to create something I never tried before. I remembered a game from the old days I use to play called “Mars Taxi”. I decided to create a clone of that. This is my alpha version called “AstroMania”. See my blog entry for this game on GarageGames.com.

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Download
You download a zip file. Just unzip it and run the .exe file.