By playing certain participating games, players can earn “Mdollars” that will eventually earn them various tangible prizes.

Tire Storm is currently one of the games you can play to earn these “Mdollars”.  Each day, the top score in Tire Storm will receive 4 Mdollars.

Mashooo also runs periodic contests that can earn you even more “Mdollars”.   See the “Last man standing” challenge in the screenshot below.

Very cool stuff.  I really like where Mashooo is going with their site.  Why don’t you head on over an earn some  “M-ching”.

-Jeff Weber

So far I have 2 levels complete… well almost complete.  I still need to create some new background images.  I’m tired of the existing three backgrounds from Diver 1

The 2 levels I have completed aren’t really anything too new.  Just some simple straight in dives to warm players up.  The next level I’m going to build will introduce the new “spinner” obstacle.  It’ll knock you around pretty good if you have the fortune of hitting one.

Anyway, here are some screenshots of the first 2 levels. 

Diver 2 (Dive 2-1)

Diver 2 (Dive 2-2)

Now, back to work…

-Jeff Weber

I had to add one more thing to my list that I forgot to add originally.  I needed to build the web page to host the game and decided to clean up the rest of the site a bit as well.  I’m working on that now and I’m close to done.

After that, it’s nothing but the fun stuff… making levels!

Here is the updated progress list.  The crossed out items are things I decided to cut in the interest of time.

To Do:

• Design/Create 30 new levels

• Create new landing page with spinner on it.

• New video trailer

  • Possibly see if someone would like to help with this as I suck at making vids.
  • Could give away early access to the game in trade.
  • Got a couple people interested in doing this. (great!)

Working On It:

• Cleanup website

Completed:

• Add support for Google analytics

• Number of dives started
• Number of succeful divers

• Update the render loop to use CompositionTarget instead of Storyboard. (Thanks Silverlight 3)

• Look into local storage code to make sure it’ll work with the new version of the game.

• Reduce the game foot print on the screen. (Currently takes up to much space vertically)

• Refactor load-level logic to reduce duplicate code

• Implement spinners to be built using a Canvas + child paths.

  • Utilize multiple geoms per body.
  • Canvas = Body

• Make diving boards configurable from Expression Blend.

  • Create a bare-bones custom control with some simple properties that can be read out in code

• Enable GPU acceleration (thank you Silverlight 3)

  • Particles
  • Diver
  • Spinners
  • H20

• Try updating to Farseer Physics Engine 2.x (Diver is currently built on an old version of the engine)

  • Thoroughly test everything in the game.
  • If the upgrade doesn’t go well stick with existing version of engine.
• Trees/Plants (non-interactive only.) time permitting.

-Jeff Weber

You can check it out live and try to top the high score list by playing it here on my site or over at Mashooo.

Let me know what you think or if you run into any bugs with it.

-Jeff Weber

This week’s development on Diver 2 has gone well. 

The biggest item completed was getting the code re-factored to a point where I could create all the new Diver levels using Expression Blend.  I can now set diver’s start position, draw out landscapes and collision polygons, place and configure diving boards, and place and configure the buoys all within Expression Blend.  I use to have to muck with the code to get everything going.

None of this is anything fancy, but it’s very functional and should make level building much easier.

I’m a big fan of pictures, so here are some screen shots of a prototype/test dive.  

The first screenshot is what the dive looks like inside of Blend.  The red depicts the collision geometry, the green circle is the start position for diver, the blue rectangle controls where the buoys are placed, and the red sticking out of the cliff that looks like a diving board is, ta-da, where the diving board is placed.

In Expression Blend (editing)

This second screenshot is the in-game view of the same level.

In Game

If you are tracking my development progress, here is the updated task list.  As mentioned last time, this list is broken into three categories: Things I still need to do, things I’m currently working on, and things completed.

To Do:

• Try updating to Farseer Physics Engine 2.x (Diver is currently built on an old version of the engine)

  • Thoroughly test everything in the game.
  • If the upgrade doesn’t go well stick with existing version of engine.

• Create new landing page with spinner on it.

• Trees/Plants (non-interactive only.) time permitting.

• New video trailer

  • Possibly see if someone would like to help with this as I suck at making vids.
  • Could give away early access to the game in trade.

• Add support for Google analytics

  • Number of dives started
  • Number of successful dives
  • Levels stats
  • Anything else that seems worth tracking.

• Design/Create 30 new levels

Working On It:

• Update the render loop to use CompositionTarget instead of Storyboard. (Thanks Silverlight 3)

• Enable GPU acceleration (thank you Silverlight 3)

  • Particles
  • Diver
  • Spinners
  • H20

Completed:

• Look into local storage code to make sure it’ll work with the new version of the game.

• Reduce the game foot print on the screen. (Currently takes up to much space vertically)

• Refactor load-level logic to reduce duplicate code

• Implement spinners to be built using a Canvas + child paths.

  • Utilize multiple geoms per body.
  • Canvas = Body

• Make diving boards configurable from Expression Blend.

  • Create a bare-bones custom control with some simple properties that can be read out in code

-Jeff Weber

I put the tasks into categories based on where they are in the development process. Each task falls into either “To Do”, “Working On It”, or “Completed”.  You can think of this as a poor man’s scrum board.

Enough talk, here is the list. I’ll re-post this periodically as development progresses. (Note: these tasks are in no particular order.)

To Do:

• Try updating to Farseer Physics Engine 2.x (Diver is currently built on an old version of the engine)

  • Thoroughly test everything in the game.
  • If the upgrade doesn’t go well stick with existing version of engine.

• Create new landing page with spinner on it.

• Enable GPU acceleration (thank you Silverlight 3)

  • Particles
  • Diver
  • Spinners
  • H20

• Make diving boards configurable from Expression Blend.

  • Create a bare-bones custom control with some simple properties that can be read out in code

• Trees/Plants (non-interactive only.) time permitting.

• New video trailer

  • Possibly see if someone would like to help with this as I suck at making vids.
  • Could give away early access to the game in trade.

• Look into local storage code to make sure it’ll work with the new version of the game.

• Add support for Google analytics

  • Number of dives started
  • Number of successful dives
  • Levels stats
  • Anything else that seems worth tracking.

• Design/Create 30 new levels

Working On It:

• Implement spinners to be built using a Canvas + child paths.

  • Utilize multiple geoms per body.
  • Canvas = Body

Completed:

• nothing yet…

One thing you may or may not have noticed was mention of something I’m calling a “spinner”, for lack of a better term.  My original goal with Diver 31-60 was to simply make more levels and make near zero game-play changes. Shortly after I started designing the first non-diving board level, however, I decided I needed a way to add a little more variety. Something to mix things up a bit.

I thought about it for a while and decided to create a new diving obstacle.  I call it the spinner.

So what is a spinner?  Well you probably don’t have to thing very long to figure it out from it’s name, but just in case you can’t.  Here is a visual clue.  This is a screen shot of a spinner prototype, not an actual level.  I’ll show more in future blog posts.

Here is the screenshot:

Prototype of a “Spinner”

-Jeff Weber

Diver - Released on Monday, September 15th 2008

I’ve received a lot of great comments about the game from players since then and it’s been a pretty steady driver of traffic to my Farseer Games website.  Nothing crazy, but I’m happy with the traffic so far.

Monthly Visitor Totals for Farseer Games Over the Last Year

Over the past year, I’ve had a lot of requests from players for more diver levels but haven’t had the time to create them.  I decided, on a bit of a whim a couple nights ago, to take a short break from developing my next game, Krashlander, and spend the time to finally make a new set of dives for diver.

I don’t know how long it will take me. Hopefully not too long since I don’t plan on modifying the code all that much.  I will post progress updates as I work through the new levels so you should be able to track how things are going.

If you have any ideas for cool diver levels, please sketch them on paper or in a graphics tool and send them (or a link to them) to my email address:  jeffweber@live.com

The new set of levels will be released as a new game called ‘Diver 31-60’.  Keep an eye out for it and please spread the word to any and all that you think might be interested.

Now, time to make some dives!

-Jeff Weber

Oh, and for those of  you waiting for Krashlander, don’t worry I’ll go right back to developing it once the new Diver levels are out.

Game development = fun, writing long blog posts, not so much.

On top of that, for the last several months I haven't really had anything exciting to blog about. I've been busy wrestling B-Splines and writing, re-writing, and re-re-writing the core functionality of the krashlander online editor.

I've now tamed the B-Spline beast and have the krashlander editor in an alpha state where I can draw-up a simple krashlander "level" (think 2d landscape), press play, and ski down some hills, jump over crevices and krash like a pro! (see video below)

I decided now is a good time to break the blog-silence and stir up some buzz.

I currently get very little of development time each week (~12-14 hrs), but I decided it's still worthwhile borrowing a few of those hours and use them to blog about development, prepare and release video previews, and eventually release some playable demos/mini games.

So, starting next week, my Sunday and Monday night development sessions will be dedicated to those purposes. I may not always have a lot to say or anything to release, but at the very least I'll give a status upate to ensure everyone the game development is progressing.

To the visuals! Here is a quick, early look at the krashlander editor. (I recommend maximizing the video)

This is the editor I will use to build krashlander levels and eventually release for anyone and everyone to use.

Let me know what you think!

-Jeff Weber

Very impressive vid. Check it out!

About half way down I came across this:

1:02pm—Question about Another live download video. Whitten: Silverlight being used as "presentation layer."

Why is this news?  Well there had been rumors that Silverlight would eventually make its way to the XBox, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen hard evidence.

Seems like it’s only for video now, but hopefully in some future release it’ll be opened up to other uses. (crosses fingers…)