Category Archives: Game Development

TechEd 2013, Day 4: Scrum in Waterfall, DirectX and Tina Turner

By Shahed C on June 9, 2013
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On the 4th day of TechEd, there’s always a rush to get of lot of things done: expo promotions and booth visits, final sessions, special offers and the closing party. Fortunately, I had my day planned to attend a few sessions and to visit the booths which had special promotions. As for the special offer of TechEd, I had already picked up my Surface earlier in the week.

To start the day, I visited the almuni lounge in the morning, to get some blogging done. Unlike earlier in the week, when I was using the seating area outside the lounge, I had discovered that there was an actual private lounge beyond the doors. There were round tables with extension cords and power outlets. There as an endless supply of snack and drinks, served all day long.

Alumni Lounge

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Game Development with G. Andrew Duthie

By Shahed C on May 27, 2013
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Last week, I had just attended a user group meeting for DCDNUG, hosted by G. Andrew Duthie, a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft. The topic was “Developing Games for the Windows Store with HTML5 and JavaScript” and was a great introduction to creating games for Microsoft’s new platform using familiar web technologies.

I downloaded Andrew’s Community Megaphone app for Windows 8 after the meeting, and learned about the interactive event, Game Development for Beginners, at Microsoft’s Reston VA office. This is one of many free Game Dev events from Microsoft listed in the app.

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Discord Games Q&A

By Shahed C on April 30, 2013
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UPDATE, Mon May 6, 2013:
  • Now that the funding goal of $150k has been reached over the weekend, tell us about your expectations (and your plans) for the rest of this week. 

> We’re going to start focusing on trying to reach some of our Stretch Goals so we can give our fans the deepest and most fulfilling experience we can. Hopefully we’ll manage to get a little rest now too 😉

  • Care to elaborate a little about those stretch goals?

> Yea, sure! With the lower tiers we’ll be unlocking some nice little add-ons like extended soundtracks and Achievements. As we move up higher on the ladder we get to more content rich goals like Crafting, and new game modes like Arena and Roguelike. We also have some purely cosmetic goals like Gender Swap, as well as functional things like professional language translations. We’re hoping to be able to achieve all these things for the final game regardless of money raised, but hope to guarantee them by reaching the goals!

See the original Q&A below:

In this week’s post, we’re talking with fellow XNA developer James Petruzzi of Discord Games. James is responsible for the multiplayer action title Take Arms on Xbox 360, followed by labyrinth puzzler 48 Chambers. Up next is Chasm, a 2D Action-RPG Platformer, aimed at PC, Mac and Linux.

 

  • Welcome to WakeUpAndCode.com, James! Do you… umm… wake up and start coding every morning? 🙂

– I wish! It was like that for a while, and was amazing. Since GDC though,
it’s been pretty much full-time on marketing, promotion, and keeping things
running smoothly. Hopefully we’ll get back to coding soon!

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The Future of Microsoft Game Development

By Shahed C on March 2, 2013
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When Microsoft first showed off Windows 8 and its development stack, their diagram answered some lingering questions and posed a few new ones.

Win8 Platform and Tools

In the world of Indie Game Development, we had many questions. Can we make any game for Windows8 and release it in the Windows Store? Will we be tied down to C++ and DirectX? Wait a minute, where is XNA?

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