January 31, 2010 — Although a few hours official remain, Global Game Jam 2010 has ended for me. I am writing this from my kitchen, wishing a little that I was going back to Salt Lake today to attend the ending events, but at the same time knowing that it's not really worth it given the two hour round trip requirement.

Despite ending early, I'm very satisfied with the performance of our team during this event. We created a game which is polished and playable, and I personally learned so many things about game development, specifically with FlatRedBall.
Before I write more, here's the link if you want to try our game which was named the same as our team: "Free Towels"

http://flatredball.com/games/FreeTowels.zip

January 25, 2010 — The good news is the January release is here. The bad news is that our to-do list (including bugs) for Glue is still pretty big, so I decided to not include the app in this month's release.

But like always you should find a lot of bug fixes in this release, as well as some new methods and properties in the various "save" classes in preparation for Glue. As always, thanks to everyone who has posted on the forums and keep the bug reports and suggestions coming.

--Vic--

January 21, 2010 — I know I am! For those of you who don't know, Global Game Jam is a world-wide get-together for game developers to make a game in 48 hours. Here's the link:

http://www.globalgamejam.org/

In short, you come with a team or go there to meet up with others and jump on a team to make games. It's not a competition, so there aren't a lot of rules to it, but the most important thing of all is that they allow you to use libraries and tools like FlatRedBall.

So, I'm going to be at the Salt Lake City, Utah Global Game Jam hosted at ITT Tech if anyone is in the area. If I run into any FRB-ers, I'll offer full support for the engine if you need it.

Whether you're in Utah or not, and whether you use FRB or not, you should definitely consider coming to GGJ, making some awesome stuff, then showing it off.

I'll also be working on a game with a local team and I'll be posting the resulting game on the site (with source) so you can play the game, check the source, or modify/build on top if it however you like.

Good luck to anyone participating!

--Vic--

January 16, 2010 — Glue is a new project that will be released with the January or February version of FlatRedBall which will greatly improve the efficiency of FlatRedBall developers.

A few high-level features of Glue are:

* Easy-to-understand display of a game's Entities and Screens.
* UI-driven addition of new Screens, Entities, and content files (such as .scnx).
* Automatic code generation for object creation, activity, and destruction in Screens and Entities.
* New FlatRedBall Project creation support (requires non-Express Visual Studio)
* UI-driven setting of starting Screen and launching of project (requires non-Express Visual Studio)
* Creation and modification of all FlatRedBall types (.scnx, .shcx, etc)
* Launching of all FRBDK tools from Glue on selected content. No more search for files and manual copying of files to appropriate locations.
* and much more...



As shown in the image above, Glue is a project that enables you to work with FlatRedBall at a higher conceptual level than ever before. This means fewer errors, more standardized project structure, and an overall improvement in the speed of general development. Furthermore, it empowers the content creator and game designer who are aren't familiar or comfortable with working in Visual Studio.

That is, you will be able to create a project, add Screens, referenced files, create Entity objects, and instances of objects to Screens and Entities, set the starting Screen, and run the project...without writing even one line of code!

And the best part of it all is that Glue doesn't create any custom file format that your game needs to understand. It modifies Visual Studio projects and C# code directly. It only creates a simple XML file that it uses to keep track of your settings - but of course your game never needs to touch this file.

We think that Glue will lead to a level of productivity much higher than ever before in FlatRedBall, and as the FlatRedBall team works on it, we are inundated with ideas on how to make it even better and better.

Keep an eye on the front page for more news.

--Vic--

December 14, 2009 — Somjade (whose work you may have seen on Trashman) decided to make some FRB mascots for us. I'm a huge anime fan so this is really really cool. Check it out:



--Vic--