It's been a long time... How have you been?

Hello dear followers and newcomers alike!

Time went pretty fast this summer, and it's already 5 months since the last blog entry. I guess it's not that unusual for a blog to start slowly, especially when you don't have much happening to talk about.

Most of my time have been occupied working on Just Dance 3, which, by the way, have just been released last week! I'm having a good time working with the people here at Ubisoft, and more surprisingly, I'm having a good time working on a casual dance game. Actually, I even enjoy playing the game :)

I have also been working on Kazz.Ed obviously, but we're not progressing as fast as I would have wanted to. It's incredible how much time it takes to turn this tiny 48-hours game into the reasonably featured game we would like to release. Had I known better, I would have started again from scratch instead of building on the terrible code I wrote during the game jam (which certainly did the job well considering the time constraint).

I definitely expect the blog to become more and more active in the coming weeks. Something great is about to happen very soon, but that is an announcement that deserves its own post!

First steps on Xbox

I have started working on the Xbox port of Kazz.Ed last week. XNA makes it a very straightforward process. The only problem I encountered while compiling the project was that the Xbox version does not target the same version of the .Net framework, so a few function were missing from the standard utility classes.

So a few tweaks later, here I am, remotely launching the game on my console from visual studio.
Good news: the game loaded just fine and was playable. Bad news: the framerate started at 10 fps and quickly deteriorated until the Xbox decided it had enough and crashed... :/

All in all, that's still a acceptable result for a first try! And after some hours of work, I finally managed to get the game to run at a steady 60fps. As a side note, here is few professional tips I applied and will definitely help you when developing a game on console:

• Do not run very high level list manipulation (including lambda functions and Linq queries (SQL-like queries)) in the inner loop of your collision system.
• Do not leak half of your game objects when reseting the game.
• Do not issue one draw call per sprite, that is for every tile and vfx on the screen (or even off-screen).

There is obviously still a lot of tiny details to take in consideration for the Xbox version (as the devs of Blocks That Matter learned the hard way) but it was enough for Marc to record a teaser of the game running on his console :)

Introducing Kazz.Ed

Let me introduce Kazz.Ed. This is the game I worked on during the Global Game Jam, earlier this year. Think about Tetris meet Lemmings: you place tetris blocks to help a AI make his way up while the world is sinking.

We got very good feedback on it so we decided to continue the development after the Jam and a couple of versions have already been released on our blog. We had a number of bugs and gameplay issues to fix but it has to be expected from a game made in 48h :)

We got a nice surprise yesterday: Kazz.Ed is being featured this week on the Global Game Jam front page, and inside this month's IGDA newsletter. So yay for some internet glory!

But here is the real news: we have now kicked off the development of a final version of Kazz.Ed. There is a number of features that we feel are missing in order to get a coherent experience and we are going to work on them. We will also add some polish while we're at it. And most importantly, I will be working on a Xbox360 port so we will be able to release the game on the Xbox Live Indie channel. We are not really expecting to earn loads of money from it, but it will most definitely be a nice achievement :)

So, what now?

It's been than two month since I started this blog... I have been quite busy during this time, I moved back to France and started my new job a Ubisoft, but it's about time to remember I have a blog and start getting some content in.

So stay tuned for some exciting news soon :)

This is not a cat blog

Hello, my name is Garry Williams and I I've decided to start this blog about game development. I am currently living in the UK, but I will soon move to France, my home country, and this will be the perfect time to get myself a bit more involved in this great independent games community.

Being a professional game programmer, this blog will probably cover a lot of technical material, but it will also talk about games, game design and any cool stuff. It will not talk about cats though. Or maybe, who knows?