After a weekend of game development madness, our game is complete! It is possibly the strangest, bloodiest game I’ve created but it looks great and is quite addictive so I am very happy with what we made.
Go download and play Culling of the Killer Rabbits!
Wow, has it really been so long since my last update? Happy 2011, everyone!
This weekend is this year’s Global Game Jam and I am excited to be participating again. Last year, I worked on a project called Skunkoffee with a couple folks and some of the same people I met last year are now back for more game development in 48-hours. I am with a new team with a new game jam theme and it’s looking promising after the first day. No real title yet but here are two photos from today: one of the opening event and the second of the currently prototype after a few hours of work.
As some of you might know, I have spent a good chunk of the past year working with an amazing team on a product called Kinect for the Xbox which launched today. If you haven’t hea
rd about it yet, I am sure you will by the time the holidays are in full swing since it’s been featured so far even on Oprah.
And I’m excited to let you know that I am on JobsBlog today! Check it out: Raphael Mun: translating dreams to Xbox
One of the newest Xbox LIVE Arcade games is a old-school style puzzle platformer called Super Meat Boy. Originally planned as a Wii game, it is fantastic and extremely addictive on the Xbox and I highly recommend it to other gamers out there.
The reason for this update, however, is that I came across an interesting hidden level that I could not find out about online. It is a glitch-level that appeared after I was playing through the dark world in Chapter 1 of the game and went back to the first level, where upon returning to that level for a 2nd time in the dark world, “Bandage Girl” (the princess peach equivalent of Super Meat Boy) looked like a broken image, and it unlocked this level -1, which has the title -1 |> -_- |>. Check it out!
I beat it after a number of tries and if enough people want to know how to beat it, I will see about posting a video of me beating the level. For now, I won’t spoil it for anyone else that comes across this level.
I recently decided to make a game for the Microsoft Surface for a touch-enabled game competition held this month with the Game Developers group at MS. The idea boils down to a multi-touch, co-operative pong with two modes of play.
There is a Contain game mode where you try to contain various bubbles that spawn from the center and don’t let them leave the screen, and a Protect game mode where you try to keep a larger bubble safe from other floating bubbles. You are able to draw arbitrary lines to interact with these bubbles; catch is there is a shared pool of ink that regenerates over time, which means you will feel the need to punch your neighbor in the face for using up all the ink to draw smiley faces. 
So… here’s a video of people playing it on the Surface!
We got my little sister a nice Acer Aspire One for her birthday this year, the newly designed AO532H-2588 that has better battery life and runs faster. However, due to an unfortunate accident this summer, the LCD cracked, rendering it almost useless as a portable computer. And with that, I inherited a broken netbook! (And if you were concerned for my sister, not to worry, we’ll be getting my sister a different computer. She seems to prefer larger laptops anyway.)
So off to eBay I went, searching for a replacement LCD that would be cheap enough compared to the price for a new/used netbook (the Acer Aspire One is $300) and lo-and-behold I found one for $50, which seemed justifiable to bring this netbook back to life. And with that, here are some pictures of how I took the screen apart and replaced the LCD! On thing that’s really nice about the new design is that there are only two screws in the front of the screen before the screen frame pops out compared to six in the previous design as I noticed while searching the web. Much less screwdriver work. =)
If you remember, I wrote a post about Virtual Environments in Xbox LIVE a while back for the Xbox Engineering Blog. This time, I’m glad to share a new article co-authored between my friend/co-worker John McPherson and me regarding how game developers are able to enable custom, game-specific features for Xbox LIVE using something called XLSP! Check out the article here: http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Live/EngineeringBlog/072810-DevelopersCustomizeLive
Hey everybody,
It’s about time I gave another update. I’ve been quite busy with work for the past few months but outside of that, I’m happy to announce that the Munomic team that I mentioned a bit earlier now has released its first game, Hungry For Healthy! We’ve been working on it through the last month or so between all the craziness of my current schedule and submitted it earlier this week (deadline was this past Tuesday, 6/30) to the Apps For Healthy Kids competition!
Here’s the link to the Munomic site and the game: http://www.munomic.com/games/hungry-for-healthy/
And our promo video!:
As a follow-up from my last post, here is the update on what you might have guessed as my touchscreen picture frame PC. I’m glad to say that it is now happily mounted on my wall and running!
Here are some more pictures to show the remaining work I did to make this work:
If you’d like to hear more about how this works, leave a comment and I can post more details on how I built it!
It’s been pretty quiet over here so I thought I’d give a sneak peek into what I’ve been up to lately.
Currently, I’ve been super-focused @ work with some really exciting stuff that maybe I can talk about in some distant future, but along with that, I’ve got several projects rolling! Tennis season is in full swing again and in what bit of extra “free time” I could squeeze out, I’ve also been keeping myself moving with some foxtrot and salsa. Alongside that, I’ve also been working on a game in XNA to launch with my new side-project company with my little brother! I’ll post more details on that once we’re ready.
Anyway, the main update I’ve got for everyone today is a little bit of a hardware project I’ve started. The parts I ordered arrived this past week and so I was finally able to get things started this weekend and so you might be able to guess what I’m putting together but here are some photos of the progress I’ve made today:
