I'm just about finished developing a re-usable high score web service and set of supporting controls to be used with the Silverlight games I create, including my latest game, Tire Storm.

It's going to have to wait. 

I have decided to take a crack at the Mix 09 10k challenge. 

I am a little late getting started (the callenge started Nov 20th) and I only get a couple hours per day development time, so I figure it's best to drop everything and get started pronto. The high score service and Tire Storm will wait.

So, what am I developing for the contest?  Well a game of course.  I have the concept thought out already, I'm just not sure it'll fit within the 10kb limit. (maybe if I use a REALLY small font! :-) )

I'm going to hold off on the details till I get something coded. It is a contest after all.

Now,  I wonder if I can build a 4kb physics engine....

While developing a farseeer physics water demo a couple months back, a game idea popped into my head.

It went something like this:

What if there were a log, or something, floating in the water, and on that log was a tire.  The tire could roll left and right but if it went to far either way it would fall off the log and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Now, what if the weather got bad and the waves became rough.  How long could the tire remain on the log ?

Now, this is not the game I intended to work on next, but since my development team is an army of one (myself) it is quite flexible in deciding what to work on and when.

The game seemed fairly straight forward to develop and I liked the idea of being able to get something done quick so that my Physics Powered Games website would have more than one game available to play.

The game is called Tire Storm.  The core game is complete.  The only major thing left is to add a high-score system and beta-test everything.

I'm not quite ready to release anything playable yet but here are a few in-game screenshots.

I'll post again when I have something that can actually be played.

Screens:

-Jeff Weber

Looks like Popfly is updating its game engine to support Silverlight 2.

This is very good news.  The Popfly Game Creation tool was pretty cool as it was, but now that it supports Silverlight 2, I’m very interested to see what can be done with it.

Not sure it the engine has already been updated or if it’s on the way.  Here is the blog post that mentions it.

http://popflyteam.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!51018025071FD37F!327.entry

I was checking too see if there was any new action over at the cool new mashooo forums and came across a cool post by dmiles96

Turns out he had the awesome idea to port Kongregate’s flash game programming tutorials to Silverlight.  I’ve only skimmed the tutorials so far, but they seem quite thorough! 

Kongregate, for those that don’t know, is one of the more popular flash portals that actually shares Ad revenue with the game developers.  Currently they do not support Silverlight but I encourage them to support it every chance I get.

Have a look at dmiles96’s tutorials. Here is his a link to his first in the series:

http://www.dieajax.com/2008/10/28/introduction-to-game-programming-in-silverlight/

And here is a link to a sample from one of his samples:

http://www.dieajax.com/samples/tutorial/silverlight/shootorial-two/shootorial.html

-Jeff

Ian Qvist (genbox on the Farseer Physics forums) has anounced the release of Farseer Physics Engine 2.0. You can get the release here.

You can also find the new online manual here. (Note the embedded Silverlight samples!!)

Please report any problems, improvements or fixes by using the discussions forum.

Special thanks to Ian and Matt Bettcher for all the work they put into this release. They worked very hard on this and they did everything!

-Jeff

First let me say I have nothing to do with this book. It's just something I feel strongly about and thought I'd share.

The book just came out this month and is called "Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation" by Steve Swink.

I'll be upfront and say I have not read this book yet, it just arrived from Amazon today. However, it is based on and expands upon my favorite online article about game development of all time . And of course it's by the same author.

Here is the article:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20061114/swink_01.shtml

Read it first and if you like it as much as I did you will quickly get the expanded book version. The insight in this article (and I'm sure in the book) is such that you will certainly learn something about the finer details of game feel. I think the content of the article and book are especially relevant to small web games.

Let me know what you think...

-Jeff Weber

I’ve add a Farseer Physics water demo to my site and uploaded the code to the Farseer Physics Engine Codeplex site.  It’s a simple demo that shows how to use the fluid related physics classes in the Fareer Physics  Engine.

You can view the live demo here.

Here’s a screenshot:

The folks over at Bytejacker have a quick review my game.  The Diver stuff is about 2/3s the way in.

Here is the direct link to the video: http://www.bytejacker.com/episodes/012

The game has not been changed. Just made the appropriate updates to support the new release of Silverlight 2.  No more beta!

If you go to the Diver site with an older version of Silverlight, you will see the “Install Silverlight” badge.  Click it and follow the instructions on screen.

Possibly it's just me, but Diver seems a bit smoother with this new release...

One of my dreams is to have all the flash game portals out on the internets, Kongregate, Addicting Games, Newgrounds ... etc., start supporting Silverlight games alongside Flash.

I'm positve they will eventually, but not until the Silverlight install base reaches a certain threshold. I'm not sure what that threshold is but I hope we get there soon.

The best place I found to keep track of the approximate Silverlight 2 install-base is www.riastats.com.  RIAStats keeps real-time data on the install-base of the different plug-ins.  They somewhat recently started filtering out sites with content specifically dedicated to Silverlight so as to have a more accurate reading.

Today, the percentage install-base for Silverlight 2 crossed the 6% line! woohoo! 

Still a long way to go but it's moving in the right direction.  Hopefully things will pick up once the final version of Silverlight 2 is released.

-Jeff