For a while now, Desura has been out of commission as far availability for Vintage Hero. So I've been working on a port from the original XNA code to the more modern Monogame. What does this mean? Well, for one it means I can bring it to a wider variety of platforms. One of these is the Windows Store. I've since passed submission for the store and I'm happy to say Vintage Hero will be available on Wednesday, February 15th! It also means I will be looking into other store fronts and platforms on which to release but meantime, Wednesday is the day Vintage Hero will be back available on the PC!
Want to play Vintage Hero but don't have an Xbox? No worries, now you can play it on the PC! Get it for only $1.99 at desura.com. Next up is a long overdue update for the Windows Phone game Cryptogram adding 300 new puzzles. Till then... Artwork by needyourdisease.com
Artwork by needyourdisease.com
Well it's been a while but I've been chipping away at Vintage Hero in the last few months. I'm happy to say the game is done! I still have to go into peer review and I'll announce a release date after it gets approved but for all other considerations, Vintage Hero has gone gold. To the left is the game box art and below you'll see some game videos and the back of the box I'll be sending out in the press release. Here's a description of the game story: When Earth comes under attack by alien invaders, the peaceful denizens expect their old hero, Giga Man to once again save them. When it's clear he's too wrapped up in the tempting night life of the robot glitterati, it's time for a new hero to arrive. Help Floyd, an unassuming custodian at the county jail, his mentor Mac and his life long friend Kricket defeat the evil General and his invading alien army! As you can see in the video below, the game is done in a retro pixel-art style and is obviously heavily influenced by Mega Man, but with my own added twists and level design that hopefully come together to make a fun game. If your a Mega Man fan, a fan of platformers or retro action/adventure games I think you'll find a lot to like here. Here's the trailer and game intro: Finally, to the right is the back of the box. No one will really see this outside of press releases and on my website but I thought it was a cool thing to make anyway. Click to see it bigger. Vintage Hero is coming to Xbox Live Indie Games followed by "other" platforms in the near future. The release date will be announced soon. Once again the deadline for Dream Build Play rolls around and this time I actually have something to submit! While it's not finished, Vintage Hero is actually pretty tightly polished up through the fourth level. The last two levels and final boss sequences are still being worked on, so I didn't include them in the DBP build. Browsing through the gallery of the entries so far has left me tremendously impressed and even a little bit intimidated. There's some really good looking games being submitted that seem like they'd be a ton of fun to play! At the very least, it's confirmed my plans to find an artist to punch up the graphics a bit once I get closer to completion on the game. I'll leave you with the recent trailer made for the contest entry and say good luck to all the devs who are submitting this year! There's gonna be some great games to come out of this year's challenge! Click for larger image. I had a need in my latest game for an image of a Windows Phone to use in a Help menu. It came out pretty good so I thought, why not share it with the peoples. :) So if you're looking for a free image of a Windows Phone for use in your game or app to put in your How-To page or game instructions, here's the one I did for Space Racer. Feel free to use it or modify it in your own app or game how ever you want. Hope someone out there finds it useful! 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. Here's a faster one with lotsa minor. I'll probably use this on the first stage. I like the feel at the start of this one. It might work well in the factory level. It also has a clave breakdown before moving into a cool little section that uses the Lydian scale. I may change the diminished chord in the intro. I think something like it might fit better before the boss music. Although I do like how the main motive gradually switches to the secondary motive as the secondary motive becomes the primary. Also, some of my favorite drums so far. This might be used for victory music after beating a boss. I still have yet to write the boss music but I have the basic ideas worked out. That'll be next. This is a loop that'll probably play after beating a boss during the upgrade screen which shows you the new weapon you've won. Some game over/continue game music. Although I'm not sure I'm going to include it since I may not even incorporate the "lives" system, at least not on "easy" mode. 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. This one would most likely be used during the stage select screen. Despite its rather bouncy optimism, it could work well in say a forest or cave themed level. 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.
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? |