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Little Longhorn – Part 1 – Introduction

For a long time, I have wanted to create a Silverlight Tower Defense game, inspired by the Playstation 3 game – “Monsters“. PixelJunk - Monsters
At the same time, I have wanted to try out “learn/develop in public” like Rob Conery did/do with the “MVC Storefront“. I just never had a project suitable for this.

Little Longhorn is a Silverlight Tower Defense “Indian style” game (By “Indian” I mean indians and cowboys – western you could say). It’s inspired by the PixelJunk Monsters game and I want to develop it “in public”. The only thing I know about the game, at this point, is that it’s going to be similar to “Monsters”, have an “Indian theme” and that I will try to document my progress by doing blog posts and video casts.

Video casts

As stated, I will try to document my progress similar to what Rob Conery did/do with the MVC Storefront (today known as “Kona”). Rob’s videos seems very polished and well structured, I will try to do that too, but don’t expect big road maps, powerpoints, diagrams etc. I do this as a hobby project, so I will try to use the limited time I have as effective as possible. Mainly the videoes will be “by developers for developers”, so all the fancy-stuff might be missing from time to time, if it doesn’t directly help me prove my point. The main purpose I’m going to do these video casts about the project, is to be able, hopefully in a easy and simple way, to share my thought, ideas etc with you, the viewer/reader. Hopefully I will learn a lot from your feedback and hopefully you will learn about how, or how not, to build a game in Silverlight. Your feedback is really valued as it will help drive the development, so please don’t stay back – just leave a comment.

One of the major downsides by “learning/developing in public” is the risk of total failure! This project might never get finished or may stall half way for some reason. I can’t know that now, just like I don’t know anything else about this project right now. That’s the hole idea :)

But lets start with the first part in this, hopefully, long series of video cast about “Little Longhorn”.

[Video has been removed due to Microsoft is closing down this free Silverlight Streaming service]

Note: After recording the video I can see that I walk pretty fast over collision detection, gameloop, interfaces, gameobject, relation between View and Model etc. The purpose of this video were to give a quick overview/intro to the code, the project and the thoughts behind. Please let me know if you would like videoes about these parts in particular.

Here are links to some of the blogs and sites I talk about in the video:

http://blog.wekeroad.com/category/mvc-storefront/page/2/

http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/dd569746.aspx

http://www.farseergames.com/blog/2009/4/30/we-are-bugs-refactored-and-source-released.html

http://pixeljunk.jp/library/Monsters/

http://lostgarden.com/2009/03/dancs-miraculously-flexible-game.html

PS: Bear with me, this is my first video cast :)

– Enjoy!

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WebMonitor improvements article

I just saw a discussion on my WebMonitor application on Codeplex, that a Chris Blankenship had asked me some questions and wrote an article on how he had improved my application.

His observation is really good. Normally WebMonitor uses a GET request to see if the web site is up. The reason I did that originally were because, as Chris also writes, that I sometimes need to look at the actual HTML on a particular web page.
What Chris has done is to change this to a HEAD request, as it saves data traffic and is more friendly to the server. In his article he writes how he did that, which is actually pretty easy.

Go and read his article, it pretty good and take a look at WebMonitor of cause :)

I will try to find the time to include this fix and make a new release.

– Enjoy!

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SilverlightArcade.com is open

The doors to the new big “online casual games”-site (http://silverarcade.com/) has opened! 

The site currently holds 9 games, but it’s a start and I guess it will grow fast. I know I will do what I can to put games on the site. This site is interessed both for Silverlight game developers and casual online game players.

For Silverlight game developers the site gives you a great possiblity to show off your game and have people playing an enjoying your game. I don’t know if it is on the roadmap, but maybe there could be a possiblity for the community to give you feedback on your game to improve it. Besides that you will also be paid based on the plays of your game. (This isn’t there now, but they promise it will come and it will be based on income from ads). Further more, a site like this will make the penetration of Silverlight rise (we currently have a penetration of ~24% (http://www.riastats.com).

For online casual game players this is a great site to spend some time on, as Silverlight gives a new group of people the possiblity to create games for the web, which gives some new games to the players. So users/players of casual games could have many fun hours on the site as the number and quality of the games grows.

I have one game on the site for now, Bubbles, which can be played here: http://silverarcade.com/Games/Laumania/Bubbles 

– Enjoy!