Silverlight Games 101

The sweepstakes is dead, long live the sweepstakes (for another month)

Bill Reiss — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 19:04:55 +0000

Today is July 1, and this means that a few promotions for US based Windows Phone developers have ended, but if you didn’t quite make it, there is one continuing on. Microsoft has been running a sweepstakes giving away free Samsung Focus phones, and they’re doing it again for the month of July. There are [...]

Windows Phone Developer Contests and Promotions

Bill Reiss — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 01:16:26 +0000

Microsoft is trying hard to get developers to make apps and games for Windows Phone 7, and this means opportunities for developers. This is a rundown of the promotions I know of, if you know of more please let me know in the comments and I’ll update the list. The following promotions end on June [...]

Silverlight 5 Takes 2D Silverlight Game Development to the Next Level

Bill Reiss — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 17:50:40 +0000

Much of my time creating games in Silverlight has been spent trying to find creative ways to make the graphics in the Silverlight visual tree preform well enough to make a good game. Up until this point, casual games have been decent but anything that required more horsepower was usually not an option. This all [...]

Join me Monday February 7 in Tampa for an Intro to the Silverlight Media Framework

Bill Reiss — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:55:33 +0000

Join me at the Tampa Microsoft offices as I discuss the Silverlight Media Framework (SMF), an open source CodePlex project which simplifies the playback of video and other media in Silverlight. The session will cover simple out of the box implementations to easily add video to any web page, smooth streaming video playback, markers and [...]

The future of SilverSprite, does it have one?

Bill Reiss — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 16:07:11 +0000

If you’re reading this blog you’ve probably heard of SilverSprite, a set of open source class libraries that enable you to port your XNA 2D games to Silverlight. It provides APIs that mimic the XNA APIs and hides the major differences in the two platforms away from the developer. A few months ago, real life [...]

Popper 2 reviewed by BestWp7Games.com

Bill Reiss — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 15:13:53 +0000

The folks over at Best Windows Phone Games have done a nice writeup about Popper 2, you can check it out here: http://www.bestwp7games.com/wp7-game-review-popper-2.html If you’re interested in games on Windows Phone 7 I’d highly recommend subscribing to their feeds. There aren’t too many places to get this kind of information given the infancy of the [...]

Indie Games for Windows Phone 7 strategy update

Bill Reiss — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 03:57:48 +0000

So I took some of my own advice and released a “Lite” version of Popper 2 a couple of days ago. The Lite version is pretty much identical to the trial mode of the paid version. The main difference is where there were prompts to buy the game, those have been replaced with prompts to [...]

Writing a Windows Phone 7 game? Have a fallback plan

Bill Reiss — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:58:09 +0000

Let me start by saying that I struggled with whether I should write this post. I really want the platform to succeed and I feel that raising awareness about the issues so that they can be fixed outweighs any negative publicity I may be giving Windows Phone in this post. Well the initial numbers are [...]

Popper 2 for Windows Phone 7 now in the Marketplace

Bill Reiss — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 01:35:04 +0000

Popper 2 has been in development for a while, and my goal was to get as close as I could to a professionally developed game with a team of a single developer and a graphics artist. Popper 2 was developed in Silverlight and uses XNA libraries for sound effects and some basic data types. Popper [...]

Free fonts for commercial game development

Bill Reiss — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 02:30:49 +0000

I’ve literally spent hundreds of hours digging through fonts and their license files trying to find ones that can be used in commercial games. Selecting a font that is appropriate for the style of your game can make a huge difference to the gameplay, but most fonts (even the ones included with Windows) have licenses [...]