Broken Voice Blues

I felt fine first thing this morning. I even had enough energy to take some pictures as I walked from the car park to the university. But then I started talking. And realised I might have a problem. By the start of the first year lecture in the afternoon things were not great, and by the end of it I was really croaking. I think the combined strain of a cough and the Mad Development night have done for my voice.  At the moment I’m trying to run my life with hand signals, which is not going that well to be honest. But I have managed to get some ice-cream, which was lovely.

I think I’ll try to spend a day not talking tomorrow.

XNA Mad Game Development Ends

Compare this with the original picture……

Well, that was some wild ride. I feel like I’ve been to a really good, but really long, party. And in a way I have. We started yesterday at 11:00 with a game idea, some assets and some partially finished game engines. We ended today with 14 teams showing off some polished and workable game programs that I hope you will see on XNA Indie Games real soon. In between we’ve had pizza, snacks,  chocolate, a whole bunch of fizzy drinks and a lot of development. A lot.

I kept going into the labs thinking to myself “They must be ready for a break by now” and finding everyone working flat out. At three in the morning, four in the morning and five in the morning.  I watched teams get stuck, get inspired and finally get it working. Amazing stuff. Not everything went as planned,  but having that happen is just part of the development experience….

There is nothing quite like debugging somebody else’s code at 3 in the morning.  Peter and Sarah from 360 magazine were taking notes and pictures and getting into the spirit of the whole thing. Peter was even producing artwork for one team.

This morning we had the judging and the awards and then everyone went home to collapse. Especially me.  Congratulations to the winners:

• Judge’s Choice: “Team Ice Cream”
• People’s Choice: “Unhandled Exceptions”
• Technical Flair Award: “Left 4 Dev”
• Look and Feel:  “Who needs to go outside?”
• Cheesiest Game: “Generic Game Developers”

The judges also wanted to make a special award to team “Rusty Spoons” who came in on Saturday as First Year students who have only been coding for a few weeks and produced a fully working game by the end.

We then had a bunch of further awards and then headed off to bed. Best bit for me? When I asked if they wanted to do it again and everyone looked up with sleep deprived eyes and said “Oh yes”.

Great fun. Thanks to Peter Gothard from 360 Magazine for the idea and the swag. Microsoft UK for the extra swag, Warren for paying for the food and our two other judges, Jon Purdy and David Miles.

I’ll have a full list of all the awards and winners later, and there are some more pictures on Flickr. But I’m off to bed now…

Mad Game Development Gets Going

This was the scene at the start of the day. Quite a few folks have turned up since then.

Thanks Simon.

More pictures as we we go through the night.

Farseer Friday

Do you want to knock your house off a shelf?

Did my Farseer lecture today. Still very impressed with the number of students who turned up, and teams that want to take part. If you want to see a screencast of the talk or get hold of the sample code you can find it all here.

Get into Physics with your XNA games

If I have one piece of advice for budding game developers who are into XNA and looking for somewhere to go, it would be “Get Into a Physics Engine”. We’ve been playing with various versions of Farseer in XNA and they are well worth the effort. Lots of problems concerned with making things move in a realistic way just vanish when you plug in one of these magical libraries. I’ll be doing  a very quick overview of how to make simple things happen in XNA with Farseer Version 2 in the talk tomorrow.

Note to Mad Game Developers: I’ve moved the talk to LTA because of a clash with a First Year tutorial at 1:15 tomorrow.

Destruction Golf in XNA

Did my XNA session today for the Mad Game Developers. Good turn out, and some interesting games out there. Good to see Physics engines being used, they make life much easier. Perhaps the next version of XNA could have one built in…

Anyhoo, I recorded the session as a screencast, just to see if it would work. The level was a bit high, so the sound is a bit clipped, but it is OK, apart from the bits where I’m pointing at the screen and talking about things…..

If you want to see how to create very simple projectiles in XNA, and then pan the screen to follow them around, then it might be worth a watch. Click through the image above to take a look. You can get the sample app from here.

Sample XNA Destruction Golf Application

I think I might need to get some help with the artwork though….

As part of the Mad Game Development this week I’ve been putting together a demonstration XNA game that shows how to do sideways scrolling, firing a projectile and causing damage. It is coming along nicely. If you want to find out more, come along to Room 312 in the Robert Blackburn Building tomorrow and I’ll go through how it all works.

I’ve had loads of teams signing up during the day, this is going to be great fun.

XNA Mad Game Development Gains Speed

This lot look like responsible programmers…..

We had our first presentation on the Mad Game Development week at lunchtime. You can find out exactly what I said here. I was amazed when several of the teams turned up, registered and even paid their two quid towards the cost of pizza. Astonishing. We are having another session on Wednesday where I’ll be showing how to make golf balls fly through the air and smash into targets. Should be fun.

Destruction Golf Mad Game Development Live

If you want to find out more about our Mad Game Development head over to:

www.destructiongolf.com

- to get started.

Remember that we have our first meeting today at 1:15 pm in the Design Lab (room 312) in the Robert Blackburn Building. Please can at least one of your team turn up at this.

Should be fun

Need a bigger indoors

Bought one of these today half price. Supposed to be flyable indoors. If by flyable they mean “once across the room and then straight behind the radiator” it is.

I might bring it in to the Mad Game Development so we can try flying it around the department…

Bang Goes the Telly

We were sat in bed this morning when the FreeView box on the telly just blew up. Flash, bang, smoke and everything. I think one of the capacitors turned into a resistor for a very brief moment, before it turned into a puff of smoke. I remember a theory that I heard ages ago, which is that everything is actually powered by smoke. The proof, as it as told to me, was that if you “let the smoke out” the device instantly stops working.

Well, the theory is working well for me, with the result that  we can only watch five channels. Although I honestly don’t see this as a huge problem. Then we went up town with the camera. Quite a nice sky, and some reasonable light, which was nice.
 

This is PrincesQuay in Hull. A shopping centre over water.

..and this is Queen'sGardens.

Preparing for Mad Game Development

Getting plenty of interest in the Mad Game Development next week, which is great. If you are thinking of taking part, but worried about your programming background I’ll be doing some sessions next week which should help a bit. If you want something to do to prepare, I’d suggest getting in some practice with XNA and maybe a Physics engine. Easier than you think, and very, very useful.

Oh, and downloading the latest version of Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone might be a plan.

Mad Game Development Week at Hull

We are having a "Mad Game Development" in the department next week. Any students who are interested in taking part can sign up and get cracking on our game idea.

The game will be developed in a week, starting on Monday 18th of October and running up to the weekend of the 23rd and 24th of October when we are going have a "pressure session" where we can work overnight to get the game ready for submission to Xbox Live.

The scenario for the game will be released on Monday 18th at 9:00am on www.robmiles.com (i.e. here). Students from Hull are welcome to form teams of up to 4 to get together and produce a game. All the games must be written using XNA and target the Windows PC and Xbox 360. We will have some Xbox 360 machines on site for testing over the weekend, and some Windows Phones. If the game passes our stringent quality control we will submit to Xbox Indie games and maybe even Windows Phone Marketplace on Sunday.

If you want to create a Windows Phone version of the game then we will have a special category for Windows Phone submissions. A team can create one version that works on one platform or different versions. Your call.

If you sign up we would expect you to come along on Saturday morning to the department to take part in the "all nighter" part of the development, finishing at lunchtime on Sunday . We will be on hand to give help (we might even be working on our own version of the game).

Pizza and drinks will be provided during the night. We will also have a few games set up for rest and recreation. If you think you will have any time to spare.

We will be producing some artwork and other assets for the game. You can use ours, or make your own. We will also have a writer from 360 magazine along over the weekend to cover the game development and see what you are doing. So you might even end up in the magazine. And we have some Microsoft goodies to give away during the night.

We will be holding briefing meetings during next week when you can come and discuss how you are getting on. These will be at 1:15pm on Monday 18th, Wed 20th and Friday 22nd of October in the Design Lab (room 312).

If you want to take part, form a team and send me an email with the name of your team and the names of the members. I will register you and give you access to the resource pages on Skydrive, which will go live on Monday next week.

The development is open to students in the University of Hull from any Department and any year.

Staff can enter too, but they aren't allowed to have any of the goodies.

Hull Fair 2010

We went to Hull Fair tonight. I only ever go on the Big Wheel, and that is to take photographs. I’ve no head for heights, but if I view everything through the camera viewfinder I seem to do OK.  This new little lens seems to be pin sharp too, which is nice.

If you are a student at Hull and you haven’t been to Hull Fair you are missing out. It is huge, well managed and pretty good value if you get there for happy hour.

Yellow Book Download Frenzy

This lunchtime I happened to take a look at the number of hits that I was getting on my blog. I have a fair idea of what constitutes normal traffic and what was happening was not normal. Oh no. I seemed to have had 12,000 hits. It seems that for some reason everybody was downloading my C# Yellow Book. I asked around on Twitter and I think I’ve traced it to a post on the MSDN Flash Newsletter. Thanks for your help folks. As it stands at the moment I’ve had 20,000 downloads, which is quite a lot.

I hope you all like it.

Windows Phone 7 to go

Well, it’s official. Microsoft have made a new Mobile phone. In fact they’ve made several. Probably more than 7. But I digress.

The launch event today sounded fun, and things are going to be even more fun next week. Now I freely admit I love my iphone. And it was with a twinge of regret that I popped the sim out of it and into my Windows Phone a while back. But I don’t really regret the move over.

I find the Windows Phone easier to navigate and it does all I want, including run my programs.  I’m presently wondering if I’ll need to get up early on the 21st when everything launches to get my Windows Phone of choice, the HTC HD7. We shall see.

Windows Live Writer 2011

I downloaded an update to Windows Live 2011 today. Nothing like living in the future.

Anyhoo, it contains an update to one of my favourite programs, Windows Live Writer, which is what I use to write these hallowed pages. I’ve not noticed anything particularly new in the way of features, although it does look rather spiffy. Worth a look I reckon.

I also got the new Messenger client, which also looks quite good.

Saturday Open Day

These are some of the audience. The other photograph is on Flickr too, just click the picture to find your way there.

Just had a great University Open Day (I enjoyed myself, hope the people that came along did too). We had a massive turn out and the brand shiny new Lecture Theatre was packed. I saw several people on the campus clutching their C# Yellow Books (even though the cover is not as yellow as I would have liked). I promised to put a bunch of links up on my blog that I showed at the end of the presentation. Here they are:

• www.dcs.hull.ac.uk - Department Web Pages
• www.hull.ac.uk - University Web Site
• www.wherewouldyouthink.com - our admissions site
• www.freeside.co.uk - student cluster
• www.hive.hull.ac.uk - Hive Virtual Environment
• www.robmiles.com - you need to ask?

Thanks Rachel

Earlier this week I got an email from Rachel, who has been reading my C# book.  On the web site for the downloads I make the point that the book is free, if you want to give any money for it just put something in a charity collection tin next time you see one.

Rachel let me know that she put  a sizeable sum to Shelter Box which seems to me to be a really good cause.

Thanks for that.

Friday Night Club

Some of the “lucky” Friday Nighters. The rest are on Flickr.

As luck would have it I, and one of the tutorial groups for the First Year C# course, have a session at 5:15 today. That’s 5:15 on a Friday.

Oh well.

The tutorial went OK in the end, and then I went home for Fish and Chips.

See you all next week.