Category Archives: Game Development

Presenting Indie Game Development for Windows, Web, Xbox and Mobile

By Shahed C on February 14, 2014

Update:

  • the presentation material is available on the Downloads page.

Original Post:

I will be presenting on Indie Game Development at Philly NET Users Group on February 19, 2014, following Dave Voyles, a Technology Evangelist from Microsoft: 

  

Philly .NET Users Group

 

Q&A with Pedro Güida about the Asset Pipeline Editor

By Shahed C on February 10, 2014

In this Q&A, let’s hear from multi-year MVP for DirectX/XNA, Pedro Daniel Güida Vázquez, who has an exciting new tool to talk about.

Q: Hi Pedro, can you tell us a little about your-self?


A: Hi Shahed, thanks for having me.

Well, I’m an Economist, a System Analyst and an indie software developer (mostly, game-related SW).

Creating games started as a hobby for me when I was really young. In fact, the very first game I wrote was a pac-man clone on a Sinclair Spectrum Plus (a really great machine for the time) with its basic language when I was 11 (long time ago); then I moved to other platforms (including the amazing Commodore Amiga) until I got my first PC. From there I mainly embraced Microsoft’s technologies and fell in love with C#: the reason why I first adopted Managed DX for my creations as a hobbyist to then switch to XNA.

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Kinect v2 Development: From Weather Report to Minority Report

By Shahed C on December 4, 2013

Ever since The Minority Report was released in 2002, gesture-based computer control has been compared to the NUI features shown in the movie. Sure, the Nintendo Wii came out in 2006 with built-in motion control, but it still required the user to hold a controller in their hand.

Minority Report, from Dreamworks Pictures

Fast-forward to 2010, the original Kinect was introduced as an Xbox 360 accessory. This brought gestures and voice control to a home console like never before. In 2012, Microsoft released Kinect for Windows, which allowed any hobbyist developer to build an app or game for Windows using a slightly-modified version of the Kinect.

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Making Games with Unity for Xbox One and Other Platforms

By Shahed C on November 18, 2013

On the Facebook group for Xbox One Indie Devs, members have been sharing links to Unity resources for beginners and advanced users, and everyone in between.

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Books and resources for making games with C++ and DirectX 11 for Windows (and Xbox One!)

By Shahed C on November 1, 2013

NOTE: As of July 29, 2014, this blog post is no longer being maintained. Instead, you should go to the following top-level page which will be maintained periodically: 

New Page: https://wakeupandcode.com/cpp-directx/

ORIGINAL POST:

If you’ve read my last post about Xbox One indie game development, you can guess that I’ve returned from ID@Seattle by now. I’m under NDA, so I cannot reveal any confidential information that was presented at the event.

However, as I’ve mentioned in the aforementioned blog post, developers have been encouraged to build games for Windows 8 using C++ and DirectX. So, where should one start?

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