So, as many of you might know, I’ve been working towards starting my own game studio. Right now the working title is Pixel Rawr Games. There are so many ways to distribute games now, it seems like a perfect time to do so. Since I’m mostly doing everything by myself, I’m starting small. Short of making a pong game, I figured the next smallest game to make is Solitaire. So that’s what I’m making. I’m working on a simple solitaire game for Windows Phone 7 which is slated to be released in October for EU and November in US. So, my goal is to finish and ship my solitaire game by November 1st. Seems pretty easy and reasonable to me. If I see that I’ll be able to finish early, I want to get a second game out for the same deadline, Euchre.

I think the challenge for me is not the actual making of a Solitaire or Euchre game, it’s learning Silverlight well enough to pull it off. Since Solitiare and Euchre are both card games, I felt that Silverlight for Windows Phone was a better fit than XNA.

Well, without further ado, you can go here to see the logo animation. Please keep in mind, this is my first attempt at video editing. If you have any constructive comments or criticisms, please let me know. I’m all for changing it. I’m open to suggestions on logo style, font, shape, color, etc. Also, Pixel Rawr is a working title, so I’m open to suggestions on that as well. I’m not really thrilled about that name. Interestingly enough, I just read an interview with Ken Levine from Irrational Games, whom said that that name was the one they hated least. So fun times.

So! how’s everyone doing? It’s been a long time since I last updated my site. I’ve been really busy with work, school, and the wedding. Everything is going well, though. I’ve been working on some side projects, mostly for Windows Phone 7. I’ve been spending a lot of time learning Silverlight and XNA 4.0. Mix in some Adobe After Effects and you’ve got yourself a nice/decent intro for some games.

So in the spirit of learning new things, I found a Visual Studio Template for making an XNA game already with game state management and an asynchronous loading screen. It’s really nice, except it doesn’t work on XNA GS 4.0. Perhaps it might work on 3.1, but I’m trying to make games for Windows Phone 7, so that’s kinda useless. So, I ended up making a new template. You can follow the same steps used in the linked site.

Here’s the new template: GameStateManagementWindows.zip
All of the credit for code included in the zip goes to Nazeeh and Microsoft. I did modify some code so that it can compile, but it was a grand total of 2 lines that were changed. Other than that, I repackaged the project so it will open in Visual Studio 2010 using XNA GS 4.0.

So, Jinny Gudmundsen, from USA Today, wrote a review today about the Spelling 1-3 bundle currently sold in Apple stores. She gave it 4 out of 4 stars. Here’s a link to the review. Thanks Jinny!

‘School Zone Spelling’ makes learning words fun

Alright, I’m long overdue for an update. I’ve got a couple of new projects in the queue. I think my most important one is my new company. It’s not official yet. I haven’t created the entity yet, but I’ll get there. I’ve got a bunch of people interested in working with me. My current plan is to try and get funding for the company. I want to start the company somewhere it’ll benefit from stuff like tax incentives and grants and whatnot. We’ll see how that goes.

Next on the list is Paper Starfighter. This is a game I’m working on. It’s a space shooter in the play style of 1942 or Ikaruga (I think closer to Ikaruga). I’m planning on having the art be paper themed, so it should look like something out of Rejected. The sucky thing is that I came up with this idea about 1.5 weeks ago. Today I go into work and look on Gamasutra and what do I find? This! How sucky is that?! That’s ok. Sketch Nation is neither on the platforms I’m planning to release this on, nor is it the same art style. It definitely has similarities to what I’m going for, but I think it’s different enough. Right now my plans are thus: Paper Starfighter created using Unity 3D and released on Steam for PC & Mac. I’ll have to talk to Steam and hopefully they’ll accept it. Eventually, I’ll have Paper Starfighter 2 (or HD, not sure yet) which will be released for XBox 360 Indie Games. If anyone is interested in helping me make this a great game, post a comment to this and we’ll work things out. I like my idea and that’s saying a lot.

And with that, I’ll call it a day. Have a great day everyone and thanks again for visiting!

Alright, so I fail at updating. My intent was to post about each day at GDC. By day 2, I found out that’s harder than it seemed. Everything was so hectic that I just gave up trying to update. Besides, the internet was incredibly slow and erratic, so it was pointless to try and upload pictures and video. I’ll get some stuff going today.

So, this will be a general overview of GDC for me. Personally, I had mixed feelings about the conference itself. It was great to hang out and talk to everyone, but I felt like the sessions lacked something. The Intel Performance Workshop was alright. Just your run of the mill optimization talk. “Profile this. Find the bottleneck. Fix it.” Unfortunately, I missed the Physics For Game Programmers tutorial, which I enjoy going to. According to Squirrel Eiserloh, it was about 2D physics engines. That would’ve been fun to see.

From what I saw at GDC, it seems gaming is heading away from traditional AAA titles and going towards social, mobile gaming, and indie gaming. I think that’s awesome. Personally, I wanna be in the indie scene. Sure, I wanna work for a big studio, but more for the knowledge I can gain from working there than anything else. I mean, if a big studio can get awesome  AAA titles out, then they’re doing something right. Every day that passes I feel more and more sure that I want to start my own indie game studio. A real indie studio. For now, I’ll just work on my side projects.