And so ends Bonefish Studios journey through Microsoft and Windows 7 Phone development, at least for the rest of the year. Throughout the 5 days we went in to work there, our team submitted 82 applications submissions to the marketplace (and helped it get past 50,000 total apps I heard?) even though the first day was devoted to learning the API. Our goal was to hit 50 by the end of the year.
Day 1: 5 apps
Day 2: 11 apps
Day 3: 17 apps
Day 4: 17 apps
Day 5: 32 apps
I’ve had a lot of fun with everything, so even though I won’t be going into the Microsoft offices, I’ll still develop game apps on my own time for “fun” - what a sick world where that’s the funnest thing I can do.
Anyway, I’ve decided to make this my own personal development (if you can even call making these games “development”, haha) blog because if I do go somewhere to develop games or mobile apps, I’d like to have a record of what I’ve done, what I’ve struggled with and all that jazz.
So, today I went into Microsoft having two games, Rafting Madness and Poached, “finished” code wise. Or so I thought. I wanted to finish these two games and make at least one more brand new game. But, once the art assets starting coming in, I realized that there was a bit more coding involved because I didn’t attribute the fact that everything, including the background, would be animated. Also, all the sound coding was not done because I hadn’t intended to put sounds in until I walked into the room and saw our sound guy sitting in his chair. So that was an issue.
Another thing I realized was that there was a save feature in the Windows 7 Phone very similar to what I’ve worked with in the past, and so I incorporated a High Score feature on these two games (all the other ones don’t have it but if I ever get around to fine tuning them, it’s not hard at all).
Beside all of the extra code work I hadn’t anticipated, I was told to re-make Pancake Juggler (the pancake game in my earlier post) so that it can be re-submitted as a paid app. I added a “burnt” pancake that would spawn at intervals of 5 seconds once 4 pancakes were on the screen. Obviously catching a burnt pancake makes you lose. I was also asked to re-make a game called Ad Shootout which I don’t really care for, but I did it anyway.
Sadly, that’s all I had time to do, so I never got around making a fresh game - so sad. It’s okay though, I’m actually quite proud of “Poached” - it looks good and plays well (I’ve got to hand it to our artist, he’s quite talented).
Bonefish Studios: www.bonefishstudios.com
