Just in case you’ve gotten bored of the other 100,000+ apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace, here’s one more to keep you entertained. Our latest game is called Trace Defense, and in it you need to defend your turret by… wait for it… tracing! So let your fingers go wild as you attempt to keep the evil creeps at bay, go check it out right here!
Trace Defense Is Now Available For WP7+WP8
November 15th, 2012 | Posted by in Game Design - (0 Comments)
Buckle up, gentlemen, it’s business time. NullCandy has now been on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace for four (4) whole months! I’d write more, but let’s face it, we’re all here for the pretty pictures and download graphs and things, so check ’em out.
Okay, so the download rates have been slowing down a bit, but that’s to be expected. We attribute the slowdown to the fact that we’ve mainly been working on (1) a whole new game and (2) porting some of our previous games to iPhone so we can tell our moms about them.… Continue reading
Creating Conway’s Game of Life With XNA
September 15th, 2012 | Posted by in Programming - (0 Comments)For all you up-and-coming XNA developers out there, I wrote an article on how to create Conway’s Game of Life with our beloved framework over on GameDevTuts+. Watch the demo video below, read about it on its Wikipedia page, and then go check out the tutorial and build it yourself; you can make it from scratch in about an hour, and all the source code is provided for you!
Updates For Follow The Curve And Cave Worm Released
September 10th, 2012 | Posted by in Game Design - (0 Comments)Work continues to trudge along here at NullCandy as we concentrate on new titles, but there’s always time to add some updates to our older games. This past week, we pushed update 1.3 for Follow The Curve and update 1.2.1 for Cave Worm.
As you can see in the screenshots above, both of these updates add a rating button to the game over screens of the two games. This is partly in the hope that we get more ratings for our games, which have so far been positive, to help our games climb the charts.… Continue reading
It’s quiet in here…too quiet, you might say. Worry not, we’ve been hard at work on various projects, so let’s rectify that silence with a quick peek at one of our games that’s approaching release.
Our upcoming game is called Trace Defense and it will soon be coming to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. As you can see in the screenshot above, there are enemies closing in, and your turret is the last line of defense. But there’s a twist to this generic defense/shooter scenario… you don’t have any control over the turret, it simply targets enemies as they get too close.… Continue reading
I wrote a tutorial over at gamedev.tutsplus.com about an easy way to make dynamic 2D water. Here’s a video of what it looks like:
You can read the full tutorial here. The code uses XNA.… Continue reading
Smartphones have come a long way in recent years, what with their mind-blowing 3D graphics and all. And yet, you still need to be careful when using gradients in simple 2D games, because if you don’t change your colour bit depth settings, things could get ugly.
When creating Windows Phone applications, the default setting is to run everything at a 16-bit colour depth, which can cause the horrible atrocities you see above. 16-bit colour means a total of 65 536 available colours, and while that’s not usually a problem, when you start having very shallow gradients like the ones above, the individual colour segments start to get wider and cause a problem known as banding.… Continue reading
Using Windows Phone Task Launchers “Correctly” In XNA
August 2nd, 2012 | Posted by in Programming - (2 Comments)If you’re developing for Windows Phone 7, you’ve probably heard (or even made use) of Microsoft’s incredibly useful Windows Phone Task Launchers (and if you haven’t, well sit down and listen up, Sparky, you won’t want to miss this). These launchers allow you to easily run various useful tasks like these:
- Taking your users to your game’s review and rating page on the Marketplace
- Launching the default browser and opening your app’s website
- Sharing a message about your game on various social networks
And when I say ‘easily’ I mean literally in two lines of code, which is awesome, but it’s a little misleading because there’s a problem…
Crash And Burn
The naive, copied-straight-from-msdn method of coding would probably lead you to making a “Rate Me!”… Continue reading
The iPhone, iPod and iPad Need Physical Back Buttons
July 26th, 2012 | Posted by in Miscellaneous - (7 Comments)As Windows Phone 7 developers that are currently working on porting games to the iEcosystem, nothing has been troubling us more than Apple’s hardware sorely lacking physical buttons. I can understand that their modus operandi is to keep things clean, minimalistic and aesthetically pleasing, because believe me, I appreciate this. But as iOS grows in complexity and functionality, the single Home button can no longer cut it. They have kept the hardware simple, at the expense of having their software become exceedingly convoluted.… Continue reading
Is it really July 19th already? Seems like productivity might have taken a hit, but it’s been a splendid summer so far here in Montréal, and you gotta live a little. So, another month, another milestone, this time with more graphs, more data, and more extrapolation! First up, let’s take a look at the overall download numbers, which now spans four games thanks to our newest child, Cave Worm.
Let’s start with the obvious: there’s a noticeable download spike right at the turn of the month (daily downloads are in green), due to two factors.… Continue reading
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