Hello to the Flax community. My name is Keith Cully. I am a student/game developer on the same computer games course as Ciarán and Carl. I was also the other part of the team for the A.C.M. programming contest at U.C.C.

Over the next few weeks, I will be writing a number of articles about my experience developing for the Windows Phone 7(WP7) platform. I will be providing an overview of some of the problems encountered, along with some simple solutions. I will try to keep the posts as introductory as possible as I had to spend hours (if not days) looking through advanced techniques before I could find any relevant information that a developer new to XNA and WP7 would understand.

Anyway, enough about me. I am here today to introduce you to my game which will be released soon on the WP7 App Hub (As soon as it is validated). The game is written in C# using XNA 4.0. The game will be downloadable here once it is published.

The name of the game is “Bounce“. (It does what it says on the tin…) It’s a fun, casual game. The main objective in Bounce is to guide a bouncing ball to a “goal” at the top of each level. The player must tilt the phone to control tilting platforms, on which the ball bounces, to reach the goal. When the player taps the screen the ball gets a boost proportionate to its current speed. This “boost” refills over a few seconds. There are a number of different platform types that all move differently and cause the ball’s properties to change. There are 28 levels which vary in challenge from easy to insanely difficult.

Some of the platforms have special properties like setting the ball on fire, or freezing it. The ball then interacts with other platform types in different ways.

For those of you interested in the development of the game, I used XML serialization and deserialization to save and load settings. I took advantage of the content pipeline to compile my level and hint XML files into .xnb format, for better performance and to hide the files from tampering. I created an interface class for handling the input which reads from the keyboard when running on the emulator and from the accelerometer when running on the phone.

I designed and developed the game and created all the artwork from scratch. All the audio was sourced from Flash Kit and is property of the public domain. I also performed any sound editing myself. Watch this space…             no, this one….