I’m happy to report that Cave Worm‘s first update has escaped into the wild! Version 1.1 adds global high scores, so you can duke it out with your rivals from all over the world. There are daily and all-time score tables too, so go hone your skills and show us what you can do!
Chances are, if you’re reading this blog (and you aren’t any of our mothers), you know your way around a computer. If you can’t fix a problem the first time, Google is just an Alt-Tab away and you’ll usually get your answer shortly. And boy, isn’t it frustrating when even that fails you, because it relies on a critical mass of people having had the same problem as you before. I found myself in exactly such a situation when a fresh install of my beloved Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas started crashing randomly on my shiny new desktop.… Continue reading
Good news everyone! Follow The Curve has just received its second update, which adds global high scores. Measure yourself up to the best in world, and try to set a new record! By the way, our internal record here at NullCandy is 1749, but surely you can do better?
In case the banner above and the screenshot below aren’t enough, go check out our latest game! It’s called Cave Worm and adds a humorous twist to classic Helicopter gameplay.
Let’s take a break from talking about games for a brief journey into the world of web development. I’ve done a fair bit of work with PHP and I want to address the issue of secure file uploads.
File uploading is a scary thing for web developers. You’re allowing complete strangers to put whatever they want onto your precious web server. In this article I’ll be dealing entirely with the uploading of images, and how to ensure that what a user is giving you is actually an image.… Continue reading
This is an easy to implement, cool little effect. We’re going to use particle effects to form text as shown in the video below. You can use it to spice up a menu screen or credits.
I recommend watching the videos in HD since the particles are very small and get blurred a lot on lower resolutions.
The basic technique is the same in both XNA and JavaScript. We draw some text to a render target or canvas and read back its pixels. … Continue reading
June 19th, 2012 marks NullCandy’s first real milestone: one full month of existence in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace! So, in celebration, let’s take a look at our numbers, both for the sake of internal accountability, and also to shed some light on our performance for all you aspiring indie developers out there.
As you can see above, we received our very first downloads on May 19th, which was when RockSquare and Juggling were released, resulting in a nice little spike (daily downloads are in green, cumulative in orange).… Continue reading
As small-time Windows Phone developers looking to monetize our apps, the free-with-ads model is very attractive. So this week, I buckled down and took a shot at integrating the Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows Phone into one of our existing games, Follow the Curve.
The SDK itself is quite simple to use. Microsoft provides an extremely detailed tutorial on getting started, as well as a code sample to inspire you. Piece of cake, right? Well, almost. Right off the bat, I had a problem: the sample would run, but no ads would appear.… Continue reading
Now personally, I’m not exactly a big Apple fan, especially since some of their hardware tends to be a little overpriced. But when I started looking for a nice keyboard to go with my new desktop build, I quickly realized that my desires aligned quite nicely with those of our late pomaceous demigod, The Almighty Steve.
My requirements in a keyboard are simple enough, really. Sorted by importance, they go a little like this:
… and that’s about it.… Continue reading
Metaballs are organic-looking balls that deform as they merge or split, as shown in the picture below. It’s a neat little effect, often used to render liquids or gels. This is a tutorial on how to produce 2D metaballs in XNA. As a bonus, the code requires no custom shaders, and therefore works equally well on Windows Phone, Xbox, and PC.
To produce metaballs, you create a function, f(x, y), that becomes smaller as you get further from the metaball. … Continue reading
