After a long time without posting, we would like to present you our first commercial game, emerging from our work with XNA in the past couple of years.

Samarium Wars is a scroller shooter for Windows Phone 7. We love classic games and how fun they are, so we're trying to bring that fun back.

We formed Flying Turtle Software, which will be our brand for future commercial projects. You can always be up to date with the latest news at FlyingTurtleSoftware.com and by following us on Twitter.

We leave you with the gameplay trailer of Samarium Wars but You can check more info about the game at SamariumWars.com.

Hello,

We are writing today, to announce that our Asynchronous Resource Manager is already working and under intensive tests in our new engine and game. For that reason and because of its complexity, we decided to not release to everyone for now. First we need to assure that it really works on a real case and is what we are doing.

So if you are interested in testing it and make your games without loading screens, send us a mail (3dgamingandprogramming@gmail.com) or leave a comment with your mail and we will send you our Resource Manager.

After we finish the game we will release the Resource Manager for all community.

Stay Tunned.

We are currently working on other components this time, thinking on WP7, probably some upgrades to existing ones:)

Stay tunned

ZPX (the portuguese company I work for) has just released an iPhone game.

Orange Game has simple but quite addictive gameplay mechanics, accompanied by a peculiar original soundtrack.

Go to the AppStore and try it out!

In case you missed it, the WP7 devices have a minimum required hardware platform which is exciting for us game developers:

Too bad XNA won't have custom shaders for the WP7 from the start, but that's just a matter of time.

Hello Everyone, 

Todays at MIX'10 Microsoft Announced the availability of Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. 

If you did not download it yet, do it now @ http://developer.windowsphone.com/

You can read some stuff and get some links in follow sites:

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2010/03/15/9978994.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/

Download Visual Studio 2010 RC here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx

BTW, I made some tests using touch capabilities and some sprites:p

Look:

Stay Tunned!

Hello everyone,

For those who are waiting for AsyncResourceManager sample, I'm sorry about my late, but Microsoft Portugal made a challenge for every XNA developers and I'm finishing my entry, because of it I didn't finish the sample yet. But I will:) It is almost done, Its missing only the test and dump, to assure that everything is in right place.

But the main reason why I'm posting today, its because the company where I'm working (RTS), is lunching a new game today, it is a casual game, but I'd like that everyone try it, please download the demo:)

http://www.iwin.com/games/mall-a-palooza

If you like it, please leave a review in iWin website:)

Thank you

Hello Everyone,

here we are back to really cool stuff. First of all, we are starting our new engine, we have a current code name: Unleashed Engine 2D. As you can see by name, it is 2D, but this doesn't mean that we are rendering only in 2D, but it is directed for 2D gameplay.

We are planning a some nice features, but for now, the coolest is an editor with real-time intercession.
More Desired Features:
- Avatar Support
- Generic Physics Wrapper (until now, it is wrapping the basic functions of Box2D and Farseer)
- Cool pre-created cams
- Post Processing in a easy way
- Animated Sprites and an Editor
- And some others that will appear:P

We are only in beginning, but experimental version is almost done and we will make a stupid demo to test it and of course, it will appear right here.

Another thing that I'm doing and that will be posted in next days/weeks, is an Async Resource Manager! What is it? It is a simple extension to ContentManager. If you already played Halo, you probably have noticed that mid-level loadings are very fast and silent. So I want this kind of loading in my games and this resource manager open this doors for me (I think).
I did it in this weekend and preliminary results are very good.

But, what it does?
- First you need to subdivide yours assets in groups. (Levels, Checkpoints or other else division, you probably think that is fine for you)
- You subdivide that groups using requests. A request is a List of assets ID, Path and Type.
-When you create some group, you want to pass a Callback to be called when manager finish the loading of that group.
- Finally when you think that you will need some resources soon, you call GetResource(name). Manager loads the resource in another thread and callback your application when finishes. So in meantime, the player can continue playing or if it reaches the point where you need to swap resources, you can present a little loading screen, while manager do not finish its work.
- And Yes, you can and you must call Unload(group) or Unload(resourceName) when you think that is desirable.

I'm preparing the sample and fix some minor bugs:) I'll post the source as soon as possible.

Stay tuned