 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
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 I've finished the port of Space Racer and it's now available free for download in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. The port includes all twelve original tracks plus the additional bonus tracks released as an update to the original Xbox version. There's four different ships to race each with their own characteristics. It also has online leaderboards of the best times and hi-scores for every track as an exclusive feature only available on the phone.
I think the game acually works pretty well as a phone game since matches are short and it's easy to jump into a race and jump back out when you need to. If you want to check it out, the whole game is free to play. Download from the phone marketplace or from the online store.  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! :) 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!
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. The paid and free versions of Cryptogram for Windows Phone 7 have been released. Look, a press release!
Cryptogram, the Classic Puzzle Game Comes To Windows Phone 7 Based on the classic puzzle game available in thousands of newspapers and books across the globe, you can now bring hundreds of cryptogram puzzles with you at your fingertips on your Windows Phone! A cryptogram is a simple alphabet substitution applied to a phrase where each letter in the phrase will stand for another. You uncover the solution by swapping an encrypted letter for the correct letter. If you think 'Z' in the puzzle stands for 'A', then it will equal 'A' every time the letter 'Z' appears in the phrase. The puzzle is solved when all letters in the phrase have been deciphered.
Crytogram is now available on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Marketplace Deep Link to Ad-Free Version Marketplace Deep Link To Free Version With Ads |
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