Game development is by its nature a visual thing. Unit testing is code that tests other code … and code is by its nature a non-visual exercise. Ever since XNA launched, a recurring thread I’ve often seen is how to best apply unit testing methodology. Particularly when much of the code-base requires things that wouldn’t [...]
One of the things I’ve noticed about many of the xbox games that are published through traditional channels (ie. retail and xbox live arcade) is that it’s very easy to just pick up and play. It never really occurred to me that it is likely due to the level of polish that they all probably [...]
After reading this great article by Jamie Fristrom, I got to thinking about how one should organize their exception handling in an XNA game. Since there are huge domain differences between an XNA application and a traditional business application, most of the exception handling texts out on the web right now may not offer the [...]
A recent forum thread unearthed a great idea by Jon Watte To generate revenue, you could have an unlock mechanism, where someone pays you money and gets an unlock code. The unlock code would be some hash of their gamer tag and a key, and the game would know whether it’s right or not. Because [...]
A question recently came up in the XNA Forums. The poster wanted to maintain his own asset pipeline, but still wanted to use the content manager infrastructure. Regardless of the discussion on whether it makes sense to reproduce the functionality that the XNA Team has built for us, he may have had perfectly valid reasons. [...]
What if a network session was more than simply a temporary connection to exchange interactions between two or more geographically distributed participants? What if every encounter meant that the value of your local “installation” grew by just a little bit? These are some of the questions I’ve been asking myself recently after reading an article [...]
I’ve been meaning to blog about how I finally got the lastest build of Scurvy.Media out the door. Those of you keeping track at home will remember that, though the previous build shipped with XBox platform support, the colors of the videos were unfortunately very “off”. After a large amount of experimentation, and tons of [...]
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http://creators.xna.com Now you can submit games (assuming you have a subscription) for the community to play. Can’t wait to see what awesome games come of this.
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checked in a few relatively minor items to the Scurvy.Media library: Importer now throws an exception if the .avi file is readonly to avoid any confusion over why the import won’t work. Video now has an “End” event that is raised when the video reaches the final frame. This can be used in cases where [...]
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So I’m really interested in finding a really good logo for the Scurvy.Media library. Ideally, it would work in, or at least be related to the Scurvy Bones logo: But that’s not a requirement. I won’t go into the properties and virtues of a good logo, since if you’re the kind of person that could [...]
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