Most of last week was spent digesting all the news that came out of MIX09 the week before.

Off the top of my head, my favorite new Silverlight 3 features are:

1. GPU Acceleration – When developing games, better performance is always desirable.
2. Navigation/Deep Linking – I’ve got some great ideas (or so I think) how I can make use of deep linking in Krashlander. (Will go into more detail in a future post)
3. Writeable Bitmaps – Just seems like this is going to be really useful for a number of things.
4. Offline Support – I think it’ll be nice to have the option to allow people to play my games offline and outside the browser.

There are a lot of other cool new features announced for Silverlight 3, but these are the ones that stick out for me right now.

Regarding Krashlander development for the last week:

I got the Silverlight 3 development environment setup and all the Krashlander projects converted.

I updated my navigation system to utilize the new Navigation and Deep Liking functionality.

Finally, I started (continued actually) working on the landscape/level system for Krashlander.  Hopefully I’ll have something cool to show next week. (crosses fingers…)

Jeff Weber.
Follow me on Twitter  for more frequent updates on Krashlander.

As I mentioned in my last Krashlander post, Krashlander is inspired by an old favorite game called Ski Stunt Simulator.

While this is true, it is not my intention to simply clone Ski Stunt and call it a day.  The primary concept I’m borrowing from Ski Stunt is the control scheme.  Everything else in Krashlander, outside of some larger ideas and concepts, is yet to be prototyped and designed.

Prototyping Roller-Skis With Suspension

Last week I worked on prototyping a different sort of “ski”. My idea was to try something more like a roller-ski with suspension.  Here is the best example of a roller-ski I could find on the web. This one doesn’t have suspension but it looks pretty cool.

I quickly thru together a prototype and took a few runs down my crappy looking test landscape. (same landscape you saw in my 1st prototype video of Krashlander)

Here is some footage using the “roller skis” :

Prototype Results

While I still love the idea of roller-skis with suspension, so far they have not turned out to work as well as I’d have liked.

The roller-skis tend to reduce the amount of control you have.  They either bounce too much or they are too “soft” and it’s hard to do flips.  I have not been able to find a good set of parameters yet to give them the “feel” I want.

I haven’t made a final decision yet, but right now I’m leaning away from roller-skis with suspension. I’m going to remove the suspension and see how it feels with just the wheels.

The plan for next week

The Silverlight  3 beta came out last week and it has a number of new features I need to understand prior to continuing with Krashlander.  The feature I’m most excited about it the GPU acceleration. This should provide great performance boost when done right.

I’ll be spending next week porting my current Krashlander code over to Silverlight 3 and figuring out what needs to change to take best advantage of the new features.

Have a good week all…

-Jeff

The fine folks over at the cool Silverlight games portal, Mashooo.com, have officially announced there Silverlight game development contest.

Mashooo.com is proud to announce the first ever, world open, Silverlight game development contest.

It is an open "no holds barred" style competition, meaning that people from around the world are free to participate and there are no theme limitations. Just bring your talent and zest for Silverlight game development and show the world what you can do.

The contest will begin on March 18, 2009 and last for around 3 months.

The approximate retail value (ARV) of all the prizes is more than $10,000 USD in cash and software packages.

In related news… I’ve been asked to be a Judge for the contest and I was more than happy to accept the offer.

Head on over to the S-Prize contest page for more details…

-Jeff Weber

I have recently begun development on my next Silverlight game. It’s called Krashlander.

Krashlander is a game I’ve been waiting a long time to develop.  It is heavily inspired by, and in some ways a tribute to, an old favorite game of mine called Ski Stunt Simulator.

The thing that blew me away about Ski Stunt Simulator and the thing that made me want to develop Krashlander, is the control scheme. (see below)

 
Control instructions from Ski Stunt Simulator

If you’ve played my other Silverlight game, Diver, then you know the control mechanic I’m talking about. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for?

I really believe this control scheme has been severely under utilized across the gaming ecosystem.

Diver actually served as a sort of “warm-up” game to Krashlander.  Instead of jumping right in and working on Krashlander, I decided to build Diver first in order to become familiar with the Silverlight platform.

Krashlander will be a bit more forgiving than Diver, but will still require skillful control of the mouse.

I could go on, but instead I’ll  save some details for subsequent posts.

I plan to post weekly developer updates about Krashlander on this blog and daily developer updates on Twitter. (follow me to see the updates).

Before I sign off, here is a video from a very early developer proof of concept.

Enjoy!

-Jeff