Ozymandias

Windows Phone 7 Series at GDC

Ozymandias — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:55:17 +0000

Made it to GDC, and I have to say it’s been great hearing buzz around Windows Phone already! We’ve got some great big banners up (as you can see), and between dinner last night and just getting coffee this morning I’ve had five folks ask about where they can get more information about making games for Windows Phone at the show. Figured I’d put a little something up here I could point people to.

For one, definitely check out a great post Michael just put up, where he talks a bit about XNA Game Studio 4.0. I’ll also steal a quote from him to point you to Shawn Hargreave’s blog, where you can find a great deal more information on developing with XNA.

I’m excited to finally be able to talk to you all about XNA Game Studio 4.0 and Windows Phone 7 Series. If you’re new to XNA Game Studio learn more at http://creators.xna.com and get some details from http://ShawnHargreaves.com who has a great collection of information to get you started.

Finally, I’ll point you to an earlier post I did about our Windows Phone sessions at GDC. The short form is that we have the following four sessions, information about which can be found here:

Developing Games for Windows Phone 7 Series*
High Performance 3D Games on Windows Phone 7 Series*
Development and Debugging Tools for Windows Phone 7 Series*
Bringing the Best of Xbox LIVE to Windows Phone 7 Series*

* These sessions are repeated during the main conference Thursday March 11th through Saturday March 13th.

Off to a busy day of meetings and sessions! About to see Gareth Davis of Facebook at his “How Friends Change Everything” session – will be interesting to see how Facebook is thinking about Social Gaming.

This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine version

Ozymandias — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:12:08 +0000

Just saw David Pogue tweet about an Rube Goldberg music video by OK Go and wanted to share. Love this sort of thing! Thanks David!

Break with the Past, Bright New Future: Windows Phone Application Development Platform built on XNA and Silverlight

Ozymandias — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:01:33 +0000

Went down to San Francisco yesterday to attend a dinner where Charlie Kindle walked a few industry folks around how we approached building Windows Phone, as well as some of the ramifications for software development that fall out of that. Although I’ll point you to Charlie’s blog for some more thoughts, the big thing I want to highlight is that we’ve stepped into a brave new world. Windows Phone was built from the ground up with a focus on the end-user experience, and this focus gave us the opportunity to revisit every aspect of the Windows Phone platform, from hardware, software, and services to the applications platform partners would be able to use to develop apps. That said, stepping into this brave new world also requires change – and it’s significant. To quote Charlie:

For us, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past. To enable the fantastic user experiences you’ve seen in the Windows Phone 7 Series demos so far we’ve had to break from the past. To meet the goals above we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. As a result previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.

The expertise and familiarity with our tools is not lost. If you are a .NET developer today your skills and much of your code will move forward. If you are Silverlight or XNA developer today you’re gonna be really happy.

As we move into a connected, cloud-based world, partners have asked us for ways to more easily reuse their code and leverage that work across all of the connected platforms they’re now being asked to support. From the games perspective, partners are thinking about how to build and create games for consoles, the PC, web browsers, and mobile devices such as Zune and now Windows Phone. They’re looking to deploy their apps across all of these platforms, with as little additional work as possible to do so (such as UI or interface changes between platforms). To enable this we decided to break away from the past and focus on a few, core, well-established development platforms that deliver on that ask. Over the last few years we took steps in this direction by enabling the XNA Framework on the Xbox 360, PC, and Zune. Today we announced that we’re also extending the XNA Framework to Windows Phone, as well as enabling Silverlight application development.

We will be talking more about how to use the XNA Framework for games at GDC next week, and we will go into much more depth on both the XNA Framework and Silverlight the following week at MIX in Las Vegas. If you have any interest in developing applications for Windows Phone 7 Series devices, I strongly encourage you to attend MIX. In addition, keep an eye on the following blogs for additional details in the coming weeks:

Michael Klucher – XNA Game Development and Design
Shawn Hargreaves – XNA Coding and Optimization
Anad Iyer – Silverlight Application Development
Christian Schormann – Silverlight and Tools

I’ll be at GDC all next week, and then heading to Vegas for MIX the week afterward. Please let me know if you’re attending – love to meet up with some of you and get your thoughts!

Your Thoughts on Xbox LIVE and Windows Phone?

Ozymandias — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:07:10 +0000

It’s been a few days since we announced that we’ll be bringing Xbox LIVE to Windows Phone 7 Series. To recap, we stated that starting this holiday you’ll be able to:

Collect Achievements and build your Gamerscore
View Xbox LIVE leaderboards
See your Xbox LIVE Avatar
Access Spotlight feeds, including the latest tips and tricks, game news, updates and more
Add Xbox LIVE friends to your friends list while out on the go
Play turn-based (asynchronous) multiplayer games

We’re curious what you think! Anything strike you as particularly exciting? What sorts of Xbox LIVE-enabled experiences would you like to see us enable in the future? What questions do you have?

Although I won’t be able to answer all of your questions at this point in time, we should hopefully be able to address some of them. And I can tell you the product teams who are building the product will be reviewing your feedback as well, so it’s a great opportunity to speak up! Finally, though I am happy to also discuss on Twitter (via my Ozymandias account), please be sure to leave your comment here on the blog so the product team can access your feedback!

All that said, this is a public forum, and you should assume that anything you post might be read or used by pretty much anyone on the net, including Microsoft. Short form, if you think you have a killer idea that you want to go make a business from, you should not post it here. Otherwise, we look forward to the conversation!

Want to Make Games for Windows Phone? Go to GDC!

Ozymandias — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:46:25 +0000

We’ve announced Windows Phone 7 Series with Xbox LIVE, and also pointed folks to MIX10 to learn about developing applications for the platform. But what about games, those most exalted of applications? To cut to the chase, if you’ve got game, you’ll want to head to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and attend these sessions:

Developing Games for Windows Phone 7 Series*
High Performance 3D Games on Windows Phone 7 Series*
Development and Debugging Tools for Windows Phone 7 Series*
Bringing the Best of Xbox LIVE to Windows Phone 7 Series*

* These sessions are repeated during the main conference Thursday March 11th through Saturday March 13th.

You can also find some more information on both GDC and MIX from Michael Klucher and Shawn Hargreaves – well worth following in the months ahead! I’ll be at the show as well – love to chat if you’re going!

Heavy Rain + Natal: The “Missed” Opportunity

Ozymandias — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:56:29 +0000

I’ve been a Quantic Dream fan ever since playing Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (at least the early part of the game, before the plot went simply insane). Anyway, I pre-ordered Heavy Rain many months ago, hoping that the game would deliver on its early promise.

Having only spent a few hours with the game so far, it’s too early for me to have a reasonable opinion on that. However, something struck me early on, and I just haven’t been able to shake it: Heavy Rain and Natal were made for each other, and it’s a shame the two will never meet.

Playing Heavy Rain is a fascinating experience. The game tries to map contextual user input onto a controller – something that, in itself, has absolutely no context in the game world. It attempts to immerse you into that world by showing you a motion which you need to duplicate on the controller – examples include having you swirl a stick to show a badge, or holding down an awkward series of buttons to simulate a difficult movement. The problem is that the controller itself simply doesn’t exist inside the game world – so the user is being asked to try and translate a motion that’s intended to suggest a real-world analog, then trigger it appropriately on a device that isn’t in that “real” game world. Unfortunately, this just isn’t that intuitive, even to a oldschool gamer like myself. And when I tried to have a non-gaming friend of mine play, he gave up in frustration saying that the controls were “just annoying.” He didn’t buy the immersiveness argument at all.

That led me to imagining what Heavy Rain might have been if time and space (and competitive interests) had allowed Natal to be the control interface. Suddenly you’d have an immersive story with digital actors that you could control by actually doing the appropriate movement. Pretend to flash that badge by swiping it from your side and holding it up. Slap the guy by literally slapping the air. It would all have to be tuned and playtested of course, but you’d have the huge advantage of every user already knowing how to play intuitively. As Natal promises, your body is the controller, and you already know how to play because the actions are the same ones you would naturally do.

It’s too bad that Natal and Heavy Rain end up being a “missed” opportunity (albeit exceedingly unlikely). I’ll be curious to see if Quantic Dream is able to anything with Sony’s motion controller… especially since no matter how good the implementation, you won’t be able to escape the fact that you’re still holding an actual controller. Guess I’ll just have to cross my fingers that the game will do really well, and we’ll have a chance to have Quantic Dream do something on the Xbox sometime in the future.

[Via Engadget] The Surprisingly Seedy Side of MicroSD Production

Ozymandias — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:36:48 +0000

Via Engadget, sourced from Bunny, just wanted to past along a really fascinating article around SD card production in Asia. If you’ve ever had a chance to wander the pirate markets in China and wonder just how this stuff actually gets made, you’ll find it an interesting read.

Wired on Microsoft’s Challenge for Windows Phone 7: Wooing Developers

Ozymandias — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:31:41 +0000

Wanted to pass along a realistic take from Brian X Chen of Wired on both the challenges and opportunity Microsoft has with wooing developers to support the Windows Phone 7 Series. On the pessimistic side, we have some folks who wrote off Windows Mobile years ago:

Kai Yu, CEO of BeeJive, was pessimistic. He said his independent company, which makes apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry, wrote off Windows Mobile years ago because of “incomplete, half-assed” developer tools and a lack of support from Microsoft, and he doesn’t see those problems changing with a new operating system.

And while I wasn’t developer on Windows Mobile back in the day, I can say the overall quality of earlier phones using Microsoft’s phone OS was definitely lacking IMO. I’ve never been shy about the fact that I bought an iPhone the day it came out. With it, Apple took a huge step forward around creating a user-focused experience that paved the way for a “new” type of consumer: real people, living real lives.

On the positive side, I loved this quote from Jim Scheinman, COO of Pageonce:

“My speculation is that Microsoft has some incredible platforms they can tie all together with the new mobile platform,” Scheinman said. “If one developer can write across all the other platforms, that would be easier for us and all the developers…. If you want to attract hundreds of thousands of developers, it would behoove Microsoft to try to make that happen. That would be a very, very exciting opportunity for all of us.”

We’re not talking about details around our development platform until MIX10 in March. But I’ll highlight a recent quote from our Mobile Group chief Andy Lees from a recent conference call:

“You’re also right to point out that a marketplace is included, and the marketplace will work for applications but also for games, so the gaming marketplace for the first time will utilize Xbox Live, and that enables you to create multiplayer, multiscreen games, and the marketplace will facilitate that, so that it will actually work across screens.”

The opportunity is ours to lose in enabling developers to quickly and easily create applications and experiences (and games!) across multiple screens and devices. As Wired points out, we have a lot of work ahead of us… but I can also say that I think we’ve lined up all the dots such that when we actually draw the line, people will be very excited. If you have any interest at all in developing for Windows Phone 7, definitely hit MIX10. I’ll be there, and I’d love to chat with you! And yes, I am planning to replace my iPhone with a Windows Phone 7. Sorry Steve; it’s been a great ride, but I can’t resist being connected to my LIVE community and games… and I can hardly wait to see what the next year brings!

Now “Ozymandias” on Twitter

Ozymandias — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:51:13 +0000

Hi All -

Thanks to a generous soul, I’m now able to use Ozymandias as my primary Twitter account! This will be my sole Twitter account going forward; please feel free to follow me here.

Happy Monday!

[Engadget] Windows Phone 7 Series: everything you ever wanted to know

Ozymandias — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:59:42 +0000

Just wanted to point you to a great post by Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky that summarizes known information around our Windows Phone 7 Series announcement. Being the Xbox LIVE/cloud gaming guy, I of course loved this quote:

Games hub: Integrates with Xbox LIVE, including the housing of a miniature version of your avatar (in 3D and everything), Xbox LIVE games and achievements, Spotlight feeds, and the ability to browse gamer profiles. Microsoft hasn’t shown any games yet, but has made mention of Facebook-style turn-based casual games being part of the equation. It’s our impression that these devices have the horsepower to push pretty decent gaming experiences, and the integration with Xbox and its ecosystem is being taken very seriously by the folks in Redmond. We hope the fruit of this union will focus on more than just users hoping to play Sudoku on their phone. This should be an easy one to not screw up.

Indeed – and I’m really looking forward to the next year as we start making more announcements around our Windows Phone 7 games and Xbox LIVE integration. Tip of the iceberg baby!