Well, what a week! I've been working hard on my entry into this year's DevSta challenge... The theme was "old school, new cool" so I decided to remake one of the classics from the "Golden Age of Video Games", Missile Command.
The competition is now closed (results in a couple of weeks... fingers crossed!), so I figured I'd share some of my experiences. Before we begin, here's a screenshot of what it looks like:
First of all, I wrote it using GDI+ (that is, WinForms). You could choose between a windows client application, silverlight, windows mobile or a vista gadget. I'm already pretty familiar with GDI+ and I figured if I did it in WPF or something, I'd be spending all my time learning WPF and not so much time actually implementing something. Maybe next year I'll learn WPF :-)
Anyway, I learned a few things I didn't know about before, and that's always a good thing. For example, GDI+ actually does a pretty good job with transformations (rotations and scaling) though not such a good job with partial blits (i.e. they're quite slow)
One of the main "features" of my game (in my opinion) is the AI of the vehicles. Well, it's not really AI, just the way the vehicles try to avoid the rocks (and each other) as they move down the screen. When you've got as many vehicles on the screen at once as we do in the screenshot, it can be a bit hard to tell, but I think it looks pretty cool :-)
Anyway, here's my entry. I don't find out how I went until the 29th, so here's hoping! First prize is a trip to Las Vegas for the MIX09 conference next year, which'd be awesome!