Friday, October 22, 2010 at 07:41PM
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.
XNA Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 10:21PM 
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.
XNA Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 09:01PM 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.
XNA Tuesday, October 19, 2010 at 10:29PM 
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 Monday, October 18, 2010 at 09:20PM 
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.
