UberGamerMonkey.com

I can't really believe that it is already a new year.  A lot of things have been going on, and things are starting to calm back down.  First off, earlier this month, I posted my first article of a series to Sgt. Conker's website.  The series will explain on how to create a simple platformer game, entitled "I Can Has Platformer?"  Part 1 goes through the motions of creating a new project, and creating a simple tilemap to display the world.  You can read the full article here.  I am almost done with Part 2, which will cover adding a player to the game, and some simple collision with the tilemap. 

Since I usually feel a need to change gears often, I have been trying to put some finishing touches on a new website that will be going into a closed beta of sorts until I get it right.  It is made using Asp.net MVC, and I have to say, I love MVC compared to Webforms.  I will release more info on this site when I think it is ready to be publicly known.  And if that wasn't enough, I have started back up into digging around the iPhone sdk.  I have a new app that isn't a game in the works and hopefully will be pushing it to the app store sometime in February. 

Side note on DPB, I think it is a bust...  Till then, peace out~

Man it has been a while...  Games, moving, work, the list goes on, but I don't really want to blame them for my lack of effort.  On that note, I have been getting back into XNA, and even have written an article for a new XNA site since Ziggy has been slacking in getting his site back up in working condition.  The article I have written is on the subject of simple animated sprites.  It goes thru step by step on making a simple animate sprite first with an image per frame, to a simple class that uses a sprite sheet.  You can read the article on Sgt. Conker's website, which is entitled Simple 2D Animated Sprite.

I am in the process of writing a series of articles on how to create a simple 2D Platform game.  Each part of the series will be hosted on Sgt. Conker's website, and the first one is in the works.  I won't spoil any of the juicy details, you can read them when they are posted.

Along with the articles, it has given me a fresh inspiration on the DPB contest I have going with Zedox... Hopefully it will be completed in time for our deadline, and then Zedox can TMB!

I will be posting progress on both my DPB game and the article series in the near future.  Till then, peace out~

Been slacking in updating but I have some news!  My friend Zedox and I are doing a 2D platformer contest against each other.  Our due date for this contest is around Jan 31st, 2010.  He has a few videos posted on his game already called, "Tears"... just like slicin onions I think... ;)  I do have one video up right now, and will be having another one up here shortly.  The working title of my platformer is called "Mischievous Adventures of Tricky."  MAoT will pay homage to one of the best platformers I have ever played, "Conker's Bad Fur Day."  The current video I have is using a temporary character I rip'd from James Silva's book.  More will come when I get the time to post.

Have you ever wished you had a button that would make you defeat your enemies at any game?  Well look no further, the iWin app for your iPhone/Ipod Touch is here!  Each time you press this button you will be overwhelmed with it's power and allow you to pwn your opponents.

The button can be customized with 4 different colorful designs.

Get it from iTunes here!

Screen shot(s):

Since my first iPhone app, I have learned a lot, and started to get better at working with Xcode and Obj-C.  I have been working on a new simple 2d game, that I have named "Ledge Faller."  Ledge Faller will have at least 2 gameplay modes, and have access to a global high scores table.  At the time of this post, I have 1 gameplay mode finished, and working on the global highscores table.  I'm not going to go into more detail on the gameplay just yet, but I can give you this nice juicey screen of the current menu!

I also haven't forgotten about my first app, iWin.  I will be optimizing, and tweaking the UI with what I have learned since creating it, as well as add new buttons and even new sounds! 

Don't forget to check back here for any new updates!

 

I got tired of the old joomla site. It seemed too cluttered and slow. For what I am wanting to do, it just seemed too much. I'm giving this WordPress a run to see how good it is. I am also going to change the orientation of this site a bit. Still going to be a personal site for me, but will have information and such for game development, and maybe even some web tips. Stay tuned, cause this site is going to be tearing it up in the next few weeks as I tinker.

Over on David "LetsKillDave" Weller's blog, David has posted the latest DirectX SDK. He lists the new features with this release of the SDK, amongst them is 3 new samples. To read more about the June SDK, read David's blog post.

I have been working on this tilemap engine for a bit off and on, and recently started to implement it with a 2d camera. I had it all working from some examples I dissected, regurgitated, and mixed in with some cyber wizardry. There was only 1 slight issue. When I went to rotate the map, or zoom in or out, I got some funky artifacts. This happens when using tiles. I was content with what I had, but I wanted it to be the best darn tilemap engine in the world! (ok, that is kinda pushing it, but you get the drift.) I started to look on how I could implement what I had, but not get the artifacts. I found out that XNA has a nifty little class called, RenderTarget2D. It took some tinkering and mostly me trying to remember my math from college... Which by the way, it seems if you don't use it, you lose it. Curse my memory! Tonight though, I finally finished it, but it is not polished yet. There is still some stuff left I want to tweak and make it better. I am posting some screen shots so you can see what I'm talking about. After I polish this off, I am going to clean up my code and create a nice little tutorial of sorts, cause you know, this thing bug'd me for a while...

Games for Change and Microsoft announced a new XNA contest at the fourth annual Games for Change Festival at Parsons The New School for Design. The contest is set to launch sometime this summer. Read more here.

The guys over at GarageGames.com have finally released their XNA engine called Torque X and their tool set called Torque X Builder. Torque X comes in 2 flavors, standard and a professional edition. The standard is free, and the profession costs some money (depending if you are indie or commercial), but the profession does include the source code. The tool set Torque X Builder is free for the users that have subscribed to the XNA Creators Club, otherwise it is a 30 day free trial, and then costs a bit (again, depends on if you are an indie or a commercial dev). Lastly, they have released a Platformer starter kit for the Torque X engine. For more information, check out GarageGames.com here.