Frog The Door Games

I took a short break from Vintage Hero to quickly put together a simple app that may be of some use to you musicians out there. It's called Setlist and it's an easy way to keep track of your band repertoires and setlists. The app is totally free (ad supported) and is available now in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

So I'll think I'll get back Vintage Hero real soon as it would be great to have something ready for this year's Dream Build Play. Although first I'm considering finishing a port I've been sparingly working on of Space Racer for WP7. It would basically be the same as the Xbox version but I plan to add online leaderboards, making it a shit ton cooler. Either way, nothing's slowing down here. Plenty more to come soon! :)

So I have some new tunes that I've been working on for Vintage Hero and I'd thought I'd post 'em. The first three would be played during the levels and the other three are various shorter pieces.  

I've been working on some tunes for possible inclusion in Vintage Hero and thought I'd share a couple of them. Keep in mind they're still a work in progress and may not be included at all in the final game. I'll also probably be working towards making the songs increasingly darker as we go along. As of now I'm just throwing some stuff out there to see what sticks. Let me know what you think.

The folks at GameMarx.com are moving on from reviewing games and switching their focus to development. As a final send-off, they're giving away over 50 free Xbox Indie Games, including Alawishus Pixel and Space Racer, to one lucky winner! In addition, leading up to the announcement for the grand prize, they'll be giving away even more free Xbox Indie Games as secondary prizes.

Here's the website with all the details and here's the list of games included in the grand prize.

To enter the contest register here.

The winner of the GameMarx Xbox Indie Mega Pack Giveaway will be announced Friday December 30, 2011

Look, a promo video!

I was working on a mockup of the Windows Phone Marketplace to test what my game art might look like before it hits the store and all the while I couldn't shake the thought that someone had to have done this already. About halfway though the project during some sidetrack googling I finally managed to enter the right search terms and there it is: Fake Windows Phone Marketplace. Complete with all the necessary pages and lorem ipsum descriptions, the solution's much farther along than mine and relatively complete. So instead of a post with a download to my mockup as previously planned, here's a link to the Fake Windows Phone Marketplace. I believe it would be a useful tool for testing your assets should you hope to find yourself on that all too important featured list someday.

The new version of Cryptogram is available now for Windows Phone. Here's some of the new features!

• Now with 600 puzzles!
• Support for Fast App Switching
  
• Improved performance and speed, especially over long play sessions
• Better navigation, including skipping to the next puzzle from within a current puzzle, clear all cipher entries for a puzzle in progress, and the ability to remove a single cipher entry is now conveniently located at the beginning of the alphabet list
• Turns clues on/off and how many clues to give per puzzle are now separate options. So you can now get clues when you want them without getting an initial clue or turn them off all together for the ultimate challenge
• Set menu background to an included image or one from the camera roll
  
• Some spelling, grammatical, and code errors fixed
• You can now share solved quotes over Email or Text Message, in addition to Facebook

Thanks to all who submitted feedback. You help make the game better!
I hope you all enjoy the new version!

If you don't have it yet, why not give it try?

Cryptogram on Windows Phone Marketplace

Cryptogram Free on Windows Phone Marketplace

People always ask me, hey man, how can I get Alawishus Pixel on my Windows Phone. And I always say, "Just follow the link."

Alawishus Pixel on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace

For a few days now I've been trying to track down the source of performance problems in my Windows Phone 7 game. It turns out the memory was increasing by an alarming rate when navigating around the different pages. Even just moving back and forth between the first page and a second page would cause it go over the magic 90 MB limit imposed by Microsoft certification.

I've heard some refer to this as a memory leak but I couldn't find too much information to help me. Something was blocking the garbage collector from disposing the old page when navigating back. On the advice from someone in the AppHub forums, I added a disposer and put a break point in it to see if was ever getting called. I found one of the first things I needed to do was remove any event listeners that were running on a separate thread. The only one I had was added to a DispatchTimer that I was using for displaying memory usage at one second intervals. Easy enough and this won't be in the final build anyway.

The thing I had trouble finding was a call to performanceProgressBar.IsIndeterminate= true allowed the page to live when it should've been disposed. The performance progress bar is included in a separate toolkit available for download from MS and is supposed to provide a smoothly animated WP7 style progress bar. The problem was that the page would get collected no problem if I clicked the hardware back button, but if I navigated back using the GoBack() method, the data would persist in memory! I don't know why this is because from what I understand, touching the back button just calls GoBack() anyway. I don't see why these two actions should give different results.

Eventually, I'd hit the 90 meg limit, performance would slow to crawl and finally the game would just exit. I assume this has something to do with it persisting in a separate thread, since this is how it achieves the smooth animation. So if you find yourself with this same problem, just remember to remove the progress bar from the UI child element list in your override of OnNavigatedFrom().

Fortunately, it appears that this is no longer a problem with the August update to the toolkit but until Mango is released it's still something you might need to handle. Additionally, I've found AdRotator also blocks GC calls unless it's removed from the UI list as well. I suppose the best thing to do is put a dispose method in your page and check it often with a breakpoint to be sure it eventually gets destroyed. Or better yet, when running in debug mode, have it pop up a message box telling you it's disposed.

Anybody see any other GC blocking code out there?

The first update to Cryptogram is now on the marketplace. New features include:
-Now over 400 puzzles
-Share solved quotes on Facebook
-Minor bug fixes and tweaks

When I updated to the new version it seems a global file that keeps track of puzzles statuses (e.g Solved, In Progress) somehow got corrupted. Because of this, clicking the Play button from the main menu will only take you directly to the first puzzle even if it's already solved, and all puzzles appear as new from the main menu list.

If you see this bug, rest assured that your saved games are still in tact and puzzles that you've solved and worked on have not been lost.

A fix for this has already been made and will be uploaded to the marketplace as soon as it's approved by Microsoft.

Unfortunately, to get around this for now, you'll have to manually pick an unsolved puzzle from the list to play a new one. When the new patch goes live, I'll update here.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused any players of Cryptogram, and I thank you for your support.