Tasky

Available for Windows 8

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Available for Windows 8 and Windows Phone

Blinking Owl

Find the owl that blinks as quick as you can by clicking or tapping on a touch screen.

Available for Windows 8, Windows Phone and Android

Alien Super Mega Blaster for Windows 8

Hours of blasting fun now available on Windows 8.

Available for Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox

Next Train Ireland

Need to know the next train due at a Irish Station, then this is the app for you.

Available for Windows Phone

http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/big-time/2bf5a415-16f4-43f7-8bb2-681af3763b59

BIG TIME is a countdown timer, easy to use, simple and functional.

Big Time

The tools allow customisation of the colours and when they change.

The fully functional trial allows displays adverts making the Big Time displayed slightly smaller.  For a small price the user can upgrade from the trial and have an even bigger time displayed.  All proceeds from both advertising and app purchases will be donated to Action Duchenne.

You can find out more about Action Duchenne here.

You can download from the Windows Store here:

http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/maths-rush/77d10ae5-5d70-4b14-b00f-e0a39b1f3014

All Proceeds from this app will be donated to Action Duchenne.  You can find out more about Action Duchenne here

You can download Maths Rush for Windows Phone here:

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/store/app/maths-rush/249f945d-2643-4727-8ec7-faf2e81356d7

http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/weight-mate/bcec7012-5d49-4063-bc4a-d5cb715a7a6a

Weight Mate is a great tool is you are looking to track you weight over time.

Weight Mate for Windows 8

Weight Mate is Free with Adverts.  All Proceeds from this app will be donated to Action Duchenne.  You can find out more about Action Duchenne here

You can find Weight Mate for Windows Phone here: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/weight-mate/95ba591b-f7a8-4638-bc58-481c8170d430

Earlier today my port of Slogan Phone passed certification and is available for download.

Slogan Maker for Windows 8

This release includes live tile support and an overhaul of UI in general. More details can be found here and here.

This update reworks the UI giving it a more Metro style view. In addition hubtiles in the main menu the pinned app tile is now live displaying your rank and the name and score of the top player. Cool hey

You can download Maths Rush for Windows Phone here.

On the journey to find out what to do I found a couple good pages on access data in Metro Style apps.

File access and permissions in Metro style apps

Designing Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML: Data

Anyway onto the code:

try
{
    Uri uri = new Uri("ms-appx:///TextFile.txt");

    StorageFile file = await StorageFile.GetFileFromApplicationUriAsync(uri);

    string text = await FileIO.ReadTextAsync(file); //reading content as string

    this.Result.Text = text;
}
catch (FileNotFoundException fnf)
{
    // Do something with this
}
catch (Exception e)
{
    // Do something with this
}

You can download a working solution file here. Metro Style – ReadFile

I managed to hit he deadline for submitting apps into the Ireland AppMeUp promo and Microsoft kindly sent me a brand new Nokia Lumia 800.  This has been donated to Action Duchenne who are planning on auctioning it off at a Dinner/Dance ball in early September.

Whilst the apps have not set the Windows Phone world on fire, they have increased my daily download rate 5 fold.   I have a couple follow up apps that I’m in the process of finishing off that utilise some of the code base of the apps I put out for this promotion.

You can download all the apps from the Windows Phone MarketPlace here:  http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/publishers/Codheadz%20Games?appid=c3269599-bec9-4ffc-a806-71be2319a20c&name=Codheadz%20Games

The online score sharing includes leader boards for overall, weekly and daily for both the 50 and 100 questions games.

In addition a player can view his rank.

The next release of Maths Rush will include Live Tile support showing information such as the players rank.

You can download Maths Rush for Windows Phone here.

Based on the stats people are playing it over and over again.  I know I am.

As with all the all the apps/games I currently make, all revenue generated will be donated to Action Duchenne.  You can find out all about Action Duchenne here.

You can find Maths Rush here.

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=249f945d-2643-4727-8ec7-faf2e81356d7

Global high scores are in test and will be submitted for review in the next couple days.

Its free, but with adverts.  All revenue will be donated to Action Duchenne.

Maths Rush is an addictive little game that challenges you to answer 50 or 100 basic maths questions before the time run outs.  The game starts out with 15 seconds on the clock.  For each question correct you get an additional 3 seconds.  Incorrect answers result in 10 seconds being deducted.  Game over when you run out of time.

So far everybody I tested the game on always asked for one more go, so hopefully it has some lasting play value.

Whilst the first version is in review development of the next release is already started.  This will include Global High Score and hopefully live tiles giving feedback on how your rank has changed.  Couple other ideas but will keep those under wraps to see how they work after a quick prototype.

Altitude Mate is a free, advert supported, app for tracking your altitude overtime and plotting it on a chart.

You can find the app here: http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=4e12f3a8-592d-4d93-90cf-36ea83ed55e3

As usual all proceeds from this app will be donated to Action Duchenne. You can find out more about the work they do here.

Altitude Mate follows a similar pattern to Weight Mate, but this time uses the phones GPS to find the altitude based on the location and then track  it over time.  In addition to tracking it has a simple chart to view these points over time.

Altitude Mate is free, but add supported with all revenue going to Action Duchenne.  You can find out more about Action Duchenne here.

More details to follow once the app is available in the marketplace.

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=95ba591b-f7a8-4638-bc58-481c8170d430

Its a free app for tracking your weight and displaying a little chart and is one of a series of apps for tacking values over time.

The app is free, but contains adverts.  All proceeds from revenuce for this app will be donated to Action Duchenne.  You can find out more about Action Duchenne here.

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=a7243bc1-7d86-4a21-98bd-fc2bf5183aa5

More info on Slogan Phone can be found here:  http://slogan.codheadz.com

Weight Mate is a very simple weight tracking app for anybody who has a Windows Phone and a desire to stay healthy.

You can find a link to the marketplace on the following page.

http://slogan.codheadz.com

The trial contains 100 slogans and the full app over 350 slogans.

Reading the fine print on the AppMeUp promo, I may have missed the free phone deal.  I’m still targeting getting another app submitted to the marketplace review before Friday 11th May.

In short, publish 4 apps to the market place before June 22 2012 and you get a free Nokia Lumia 800 or 710 depending on availability.  Needless to say when I spotted this last night I cracked open VS2010 and put the majority of code down form my first app,  SloganPhone.

Whilst its not going to change the world, it will be the second Slogan generator type app on the marketplace and my version already exceeds the first in features and slogan count.  Hopefully I will be ready to submit this for review tomorrow.

Provisional titles for the two apps are Weight Mate and Alien City Attack.  Couple ideas for the final app, but I can worry about that once I have got the first one out the door.

Nothing like free stuff to be a motivator.

As usual all revenue generated by the apps will be donated to Action Duchenne.

You can find out more about the promo here:  http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/appmeup/

The concept

If you have been on the ride you will know its a musical ride with a very catchy and incredibly annoying theme song.  The concept was that being driven mad by the song, you have to attack the characters from the ride floating in your mind to reduce the songs volume and return to sanity.  See sounds great at 3:00 am

Have a listen to see what the song sounds like if you have not had chance to experience it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I also planned to use a mix of images inspired by Mary Blare who actually helped design the rides look.  The “player” would be based on the Lost Souls from Doom.  No idea why I thought this would be good mix.

No idea of how to win really, I guess I just hoped that it would fun to an extent, but was pinning my hopes of the visuals being interesting enough to hold the attention of the player.

The delivery 

 Well I have very limited time to write code, so have to make use of the night shift when the kids are asleep.  To prevent all hell the next day I force my self to sleep rather than stay up all night with a target of at least 4 hours.  Its just not fair to inflict my grumpyness on the rest of the world for a bad game.  So this gives a very limited amount of time to code in over the weekend. 

This coupled with taking on the challenge of Silverlight as a delivery medium resulted in very slow progress with the majority of my time spent fighting my lack of experience with XAML and not creating.  I do like Silverlight as a medium and may use it in future projects.

The audio, which I never actually got to record was to be myself singing/humming the theme tune.  Thankfully for all, I never recorded anything.

The game

I’m not sure I can really call it a game, but due to my lack of momentum and poor concept I threw in the towel early Sunday evening, for both the Compo and the Jam.  If you are still interested you can play/run what I have by clicking the image below:

So what I have I learnt?

• With limited time, pick a technology that you know.  6-7 hours is not the time to take on something new.
• If the concept is not working, drop it quickly and try something else.  If its not working after a couple hours, then 5 more are unlikely to improve it.

As such I have been hacking around with Silverlight a little this evening, specifically working through a great set of post on Christophe Geers’ Blog.

Based on the approach detailed in the blog I should be able to focus on the game aspect of LD rather than then engine aspect. 

Assuming that everything aligns I will post the “engine” level code on Friday night prior to the competition starting.

My most complete attempts were Jungle Explorer – LD16 and Alien Super Mega Blaster – LD18 which went on to be published on the XBOX and WP7 for charity.

More recent attempts I seemed to fall flat short of insperation with the theme.

I’m planning to give it another go this time and see what I can come up with.  A number of my personal projects have recently stalled and hopefully this will be the kick I need to get some code down and complete something.

All my previous attempts have used XNA, whilst this is my prefered tool for writing games its some what of a barrier when it comes to getting people to play.  So this time I may try either Silverlight or HTML5.  This risk here is I spend my time fighting my knowledge of the platform and not creating.  I have a few days between now and kick off so may grab a little time for a warm up app.

You never know, I may try a timelapse again…..

Click here to view the embedded video.

Been a while since I’ve had time to code anything, but in the last couple weeks made a push on bringing Alien Super Mega Blaster from the XBox to Windows Phone 7.

Whilst the basic port from XBox to WP7 took less than an hour, making the game playable on a phone has taken a little longer.

My initial thoughts were to use the accelerometer to control the ship, but in practise the fine control required to miss shrapnel was just not possible with this approach. As such I switched to buttons on screen and move the game play up a little to give space. Seems to work OK.

Apart from that the only changes are related to navigation running on a phone.

Having a little trouble uploading screen shots tonight, so will have to hold on until this is fixed. But if you are keen to see what it looks like, check out the Facebook page that has a couple screen shots.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Codheadz-Games/141436812583685

Early today it passed the final peer review and is now available for purchase on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel here:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Alien-Super-Mega-Blaster/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802585507aa

All the proceeds I receive from the game will be donated to Action Duchenne, a charity established to find a cure or more effective medicines to treat Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

In the months between the compo and yesterday I’ve added sound and music, new alien types and over 100 hand crafted levels of blasting fun.

Looks really well done from an intial poke through the code.  If only I had found it a couple weeks ago I could have added this feature into Alien Super Mega Blaster. 

Perhaps for the next XBox game….

Fingers crossed it will go through this time.  I’m hopeful, especially with all the issues found over the last couple weeks and super bug finding skills of Steve Pro XNA. 

Next on the list will be a Windows Mobile 7 version and sorting out the tax.  Thankfully Steve has come to rescue again with this great article.

Hopefully this is the last build… been saying that for a couple months now.  Must think why the bug count is so high.  Unit testing perhaps required, but more of the arch being a little loose.

Bugs resolved

High score Non live signed in gamer
* Start game with non live signed in gamer
* Get high score
* High score should be saved

Checkpoint Non live signed in gamer
* Start game with non live signed in gamer
* Get to checkpoint
* Start new game
* Player should be able to play from checkpoint

Pause shield sound effect continues
* Play game, press X for shield
* Press Start immediately after (to pause)
* Press B to return to menu
* Shield sound effect will play forever

End game Controller rumble effect continues
* Easier to repo in trial and without high score obtained
* Play game, die
* Press A to quickly return to main menu
* Controller rubmble effect will play forever

Start level greater than 100;
* Player to checkpoint level greater than 100
* Start new game
* You should not be able to select level greater than 100

Shields get bigger and bigger, hard to repo
* Shields around player ship got bigger
* Shields around player ship got smaller

Checkpoint level not saved
* Play until checkpoint is reached.
* Die, but do not get high score.
* Checkpoint should be saved

Increased shrapnel cache size
* Large scale basting can exhaust banks and code 4

New features
* Levels greater than 100 should be random selected level between 25 and 100.  Alien types will be switched.  small blue will be small yellow.
* Once exhausted levels, message should be displayed on every level.  No checkpoints saved.

Can’t repo
*  I see one small edge case in which the controller does not rumble the first time you die but will rumble every time afterward.  Difficult to always reproduce; not a major issue

Clarifications
* I know any controller can access the menus but during game play, any controller can pause game; is this intentional behavior?
Yes intentional behavior.

Alien Super Mega Blaster – Go Live Movie

On the coding front, after a couple hours last night I have Alien Super Mega Blaster running on my Windows Phone 7.  Surprisingly easy to move over. 

You never know, but I could be live in the phone market place before the Xbox. 

Had some positive feedback already, but must resist the desire for feature creep.  I have one known gameplay bug that would be nice to fix, but would be happy enough to go with it.

Last features that may make it would be as follows:

• Allow user to resize playing area to improve pkay on smaller tvs
• Allow user to change controller  sensitivity
• Improved info/help on how to play/controller controls

May hold off for a service pack, but may just do them and save the bother.

Next… Port to Windows Phone 7

You can see from the video a number of new aliens have been added and a whole bunch more levels.

In the above video you can see the addition of player shields to the game.

Need to tidy up a few more loose ends, tweak the levels. Hopefully back into playtest tomorrow, 1 week of play test and into review the following week. Nothing like being optimistic

Had a tougher time than expected with adding the market place and player sign in using the guide.  I missed the updates on the GamerServicesComponent and continually hit the problem of signing in looking like it had worked, but not actually being signed in.  Then on following attempts to sign in the framework throws an exception because Guide.IsVisible = true even though I could not see anything.  This blog eventually lead me to the solution.

This drop contains the following:

* Pause/Exit Game by selecting the back button
* Market place integration – This may be excessive as when in trial mode I will give the option to purchase on exit
* Trial mode is limited to play 3 levels – Again this may be excessive and if I have a large number of levels then can tweak this.  At present its in to prove that it works.
* Score multiplier displayed to player for cascading deaths of Aliens from a single bullet.  If you want big scores, then aim for the aliens at the top of the screen. – Need to review this perhaps has can end up with too many scores displayed on the screen.

ToDo for the next drop:
* More levels – currently simple algorithm to create the levels.  
* Couple more alien types with different cascading patterns.  Example Alien that when hit shoots shrapnel left and right rather just down.
* Player death is a non event with regards to graphics, so need to think about options here.

ToDo:
* More Levels
* Music
* Options Menu – Sound, Sensitivity, Perhaps Autofire or Button config.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=1516

YouTube FireFighter 13-08-2010 – Menus

You can download the exe and source on this page:

http://blog.codheadz.com/page/Ludum-Dare-18-Alien-Super-Mega-Blaster.aspx

If you do, let me know what you think.

Hmm 48 hours to get this far…..  I could push for a week and get this in XBLIG…..

YouTube FireFighter 13-08-2010 – Menus

Still have to to standardize some of the menus to bring them in line with xbox best practice. e.g A button is for select, B is for back etc

Next back to the game play bugs and balancing.

Menus

Menus need a lot of work, but you can see the ability to customise your play switching levels or selecting a custom play mode.

YouTube FireFighter 13-08-2010 – Menus

Game Play

Game play needs play balancing, plus a number of other game additions. This shows more of the game play.

YouTube  FireFighter 13-08-2010 Game Play

This was my first Ludum Dare, but have been following the competition for the last couple years if not longer.  I did not manage to finish my entry in time, but did really enjoy the process.  Having family time at the weekend is very important to me, so my coding time was limited to around 5-6 hours over 2 days.

Download Game: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fJungleExplorer.zip

Download Source: http://blog.codheadz.com/file.axd?file=2009%2f12%2fLDExplo.zip

To run this you will need either the XNA studio 3.1 or the XNA redist from the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867A2A-E249-4560-8011-98EB3E799EF2&displaylang=en 

What did not go so well

• Did not finish the game to a level ready to submit before the deadline
• No sound
• No prepared engine, other than XNA
• Lack of time
• Giving up with an hour to go, when so close

What went well

• Keeping the concept as simple as possible to give me a hope during the very short amount of time available
• Coding with high velocity freed from my usual constraints of IOC and unit testing
• Ignoring my ball of mud engine and coding from nothing
• Getting 90% of it done

Here’s looking forward to the next one.

Still very much work in progress. Graphics are just debug visualizers.

The core game play will consist of a static 2d image of a building, overlayed with a fire.  This is the “The Grid” mentioned in several other posts.  As you can guess the player has to extinguish the flames by directing a jet of water at the flames.  Not the most original idea, but something I think a 5 year would love to do.  With a big splattering of sirens and flashing lights I hope he will think its prity cool.

Once the flames are out, the player is onto the next fire.

Player builds his score by the rate he puts out the fire saving properties.  Let the fire burn, less of the building is saved and the player score is lower.  The quicker its out, the higher the score.  I’m also thinking about mechanisms to allow palyers to be better at putting out fires quicker.  Examples such as button mashing or rythm could be used to increase the water flow. 

Depending on how qucikly I progress on the core mini game, others could be added, but first of all the focus is the basic put fire out.  Other mini games could include the transition between one incident to the next or other types of rescue.

A long way left to go before it’s finished, but I think at least the core scope is small enough to be delivered.

A quick video of a single cell burning, the radiated heat and the grid debug visualizer displaying the data. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY7acyAEZ7o

This screen shot also shows a Safe Area overlay component and a FPS component.

After a bit of poking around I found the problem and here’s how I did it.

First things first, I needed to get hold of the actual information about the error.  To do this I made the following tweaks to the web.config.

<customErrors mode="Off" defaultRedirect="~/error404.aspx">
<compilation debug="true" > 

This allowed me to see the actual error, I don’t have a screen shot, but by looking in the code I could see a permissions problem creating the folder structure under the App_Data/Files folder.  After searching around in my web hosts admin contol panel I could not finding anything related to security other than an already checked checkbox title “Website Write Permissions” so I tried a different approach.

I manually created the folder structure as show below above in the hope that I would have the permissions to create files.

This worked and I now have the ability to upload images.  Last of all I reverted the changes to the web.config.

Not the best solution, but at least I’m up and running.

My current project is called Fire Fighter (working title) and is simple XNA game inspired by my sons love of fire engines and emergency stuff. The idea is to display a 2D image of a building that is on fire and the player has to put the fire out with a big water gushing hose.

Very early days, but will be recording the progress on this blog over the coming weeks/months.

Hopefully it will get polished enough to publish as an Indie game, only time will tell, but that would certainly be cool.

Once I sort out why I can’t upload images I’ll post some in work in progress screen shots and videos.