Games

1. Introduction

In this article I will present you a game which I created on Silverlight. It is a very small and simple but extremely popular game – the n-puzzle game. The n-puzzle is known in various versions, including the 8 puzzle, the 15 puzzle, and with various names. It is a sliding puzzle that consists of a frame of numbered square tiles in random order with one tile missing. If the size is 3x3, the puzzle is called the 8-puzzle or 9-puzzle, and if 4x4, the puzzle is called 15-puzzle or 16-puzzle. The object of the puzzle is to place the tiles in order (shown on the next figure) by making sliding moves that use the empty space.

If you are interested in more details about the history of the puzzle game, you can use the next link. But now let’s roll up our sleeves and dive into the world of Silverlight. The demo can also be found on a separate page.

For those that might be interested, this year’s XNA Gamefest will be held at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in downtown Seattle on July 22-23 2008. In previous years the conference has included presentations in the following tracks.

• System Programming for Windows and Xbox 360
• Graphics
• Quality Assurance and Certification
• Producer and Business Development
• Audio
• LIVE
• XNA Game Studio
• Games for Everyone
• Visual Arts

I am not sure if all of these tracks will be presented in July, but I know for certain that they have decided to expand its focus and include a Casual Gaming track highlighting some of the cool new games done in Silverlight.

Watching Microsoft Popfly evolve has been incredibly exciting for me.  With its Silverlight-based drag-and-drop capabilities, Popfly has been a fun and easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications.  Popfly has won the hearts and minds of many, many people as evidenced by a lot of favorable press coverage and awards. 

Today, I am excited to announce the alpha of the Popfly Game Creator. 

The Silverlight-based Game Creator is a very rich and yet very simple way to create all sorts of casual games without having to write a single line of code.  Whether it is a space shooting game, a racing game or a maze, the extremely friendly and interactive UI guides you, the user, to express your creativity. 

You can start with a known collection of game templates that are already built in and customize and share them, or start with a fresh idea and a clean canvas and build your own game.

Microsoft's Popfly team is rushing to finish a major addition to its mash up maker so it can do demonstrations at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif., tomorrow. I got a quick demo earlier this week and I hope the product is ready in time, because it's a great new service, and just perfect for the audience the Maker Faire draws.

The new feature: an environment for building casual games (think Solitaire, not Half-Life), called Game Creator There are several templates with generic titles to start from (personal favorite: "Badly built wall") or users can create their own games from scratch using a scripting system and a built-in, and entertaining, library of graphics and sounds.

Adam Nathan and Suzanne Hansen discuss the Popfly Game Creator in this Channel9 interview.

Popfly Game Creator Alpha is available today, and it's a brand new tool for building 2D games in Silverlight that requires zero programming to build games.
How easy is it to build games? Well in this interview Adam Nathan builds three games from scratch including
- A Space invaders clone (3:15 - 23:55)
- A 2D car game that plays like "snake" (23:55 - 37:51)
- A 2D side scroller with a Ninja fighting rocket chickens (37:51- 55:04)

Hmm, I've got some ideas what do to with this technology.

Rebuilding Pirates! in Silverlight 2 is coming along well. I got it running on my Silverlight game engine I was writing for use with Perenthia, which changed some of the way it worked initially. Anyway, I plan on doing a release once I get a few levels complete. In the mean time here is a screen shot of me testing sailing around.

Since I started over in Silverlight 2 and decided to use my game engine I am having to re-write a good portion of the functionality. I had to re-do movement since some of the structure of events has changed so this screen shot is the ship sailing around.

The Popfly guys are at it again.  They just launched a very cool game creator tool that lets normal people create great Silverlight based games.  The RIA development experience is very slick and I can't wait to see the games people create!

Check it out at Popfly.com and John's post.

This is Part 3 in a series covering how the Xbox Gamercard application was made using Silverlight 2.  In this part I will cover how the interface is updated once the data is retrieved.

In the first part of the series I showed a few highlights of how the UI was created.  In the second part, I showed the call to the web service and how the results were parsed using LINQ to create a .NET object.  In this part, I will show how an instance of the custom XboxInfo class is used as the data source for Data Binding the UI Elements.

This is Part 2 in a series covering how the Xbox Gamercard application was made using Silverlight 2.  In this part I will cover how the data is retrieved.

First off, the Xbox Friends Watch series of experiments would not be possible without the existence of the Xbox Gamertag Data Service.  The service provides both SOAP and REST based access and I'll being showing you how the REST-based service was used within the application.

Get the data

When the application loads it looks within the InitParams parameters for a gamertag Key.

I recently published an Xbox Gamercard based on Silverlight 2 Beta 1.  In that post a talked a little bit about the XAP model which now allows you to embed Silverlight applications via the object.  In Silverlight 1.0 application instantiation was handled via JavaScript and HTML with loose files.  Now with the XAP model we have a single file and object tag support which allows for simpler embedding of an application.  Especially by a non-developer web user, which is the main audience for the Gamercard application.