A mini game for my new game

[a_bertrand]

As part of the game I'm working on, I developed a mini game which is certainly nothing new as concept (you will find a lot of those on internet) however think that it will be used inside the game while you will do some harvesting of resource (that's the reason why the time allowed is very short). Also later on, you will be able to use skill points to increase this timer.

http://base.nowhere-else.org/temp/mini1

Art and code is all self made. To test it, you need Silverlight 3 or more. If you wonder why the thing is so big (to load), well simply it's the whole game where I show only this part...

Time to code and create the art: 1 day.

[CJ - Twitch]

Wow great fucking work! :D

[Curt]

wow, this is awesome for 1 days work.

very nice job.

[srachit]

Amazing work !

[a_bertrand]

Thanks, it shows a bit of what will be the full game at the end ;) or at least the quality I'm pointing at.

[Dave]

Thanks, it shows a bit of what will be the full game at the end ;) or at least the quality I'm pointing at.

Just wondering how long have you been developing in silverlight to get to that kind of quality?

[a_bertrand]

Well, I tested Silverlight a couple of years ago (just when Microsoft was releasing version 2), then I stopped using it. Now I started again at the beginning of the year something like in April or so from then on till now.

Silverlight is not really hard to master, if you know C# and understand the XAML concept.

[Dave]

Well, I tested Silverlight a couple of years ago (just when Microsoft was releasing version 2), then I stopped using it. Now I started again at the beginning of the year something like in April or so from then on till now.

Silverlight is not really hard to master, if you know C# and understand the XAML concept.

Ahh okay, but why did you decide to use Silverlight over some of the alternatives? Such as flash, java and similar languages?

and I plan to learn c# when I finally go to college.

[Djkanna]

I hate it!

Not the quality or the graphics just that particular game I can never line them up before the time runs out :'(

[a_bertrand]

Flash is a lot more common so far, and also more supported on linux or others, but simply it's horrible to program with. The language (Action Script) is a Javascript like and... is as bad as Javascript. I mean JS is good for little things but certainly not to create something complex. Plus the development tools (editor / debugger) inside Flash are really poor. Finally Flash is not free.

Java is a good language, and offers a good library of tools. However to develop applications like I would like you must develop something called an applet. Sadly applet development offers little stability (crash a lot), plus Java comes in so many version that people hardly have the right version you would need. Java is also not very good with 2D / vectorial and such stuff. Even resizing the applet within the browser window is not something that trivial and doesn't work all the time.

Silverlight is a Microsoft development based on C# and is a subset of their latest GUI API => WPF (using on vista and 7 but can be used on xp too). C# is a true OO (like Java and unlike action script), you can get all the tools to develop your application for free, tons of documentation, and great support for vectorial, 2D and animations. Yet the main drawbacks are fewer people use it and on linux is doesn't work that well currently.

For me, Linux is anyhow a little market which would make nearly no difference, and running on Mac and Windows offers 90 or more market share... which should be enough. You get also all the tools you would need included in Visual Studio, from a great code editor, a perfect debugger, and having call backs to the server (for example for the multi user) is really a piece of cake.

BTW Who would be interested to get the source of this mini game? If some of you are interested, I could extract them and make just a little project for it such that you can see how it works.

[a_bertrand]

Ok made the little game as standalone thing. The XAP (the Silverlight application which is basically a ZIP) is 28Kb... so you see it is also very small.

The whole zip (which contains photoshop created balls instead of the art I made for my game) is 161Kb:

http://base.nowhere-else.org/temp/SlideBlocks.zip

Feel free to dig inside, and if you have questions just drop them here, I will then try to answer them. The code is complete (for this mini game) and does all what you could expect from such game beside gaining back time from destroyed blocks. However it is not that hard to implement, so if you want do it ;-)