Learning New Tricks

There have been a lot of requests for Cursed Loot on PC, and I've been taking a look at what I want to do, and how I'm going to do it.

To be honest, I feel like C#/XNA is a bit of a dying technology for games these days, so I've decided to start focusing on C++/DirectX with the goal of eventually publishing games (and hopefully an upgraded Cursed Loot) on the Windows 8 marketplace.

 I really have no idea if 1) I'll be able to get up to speed on C++ that quickly and 2) if I'll be able to get something onto the marketplace.  But, for now, it seems like a good strategy and will set me up for the next few years, if I can get all of my ducks in a row.

What this really means (at least for the short term) is that I'm going to drop off the grid a bit while I try to focus on learning this stuff and porting my libraries over to C++.  I'll probably remain active on twitter, but I doubt I'll have anything announcement worth for the website for the next month or two.

Anyway, for me, it's exciting to learn new technology, and I feel that the time I spent making XBLIG games using XNA has given me a lot of great experience that I'll be able to use moving forward.

As for Cursed Cosmos, I'll still continue to work on it on the side, but, barring winning DBP, progress on it will be slow while I focus on getting ready for the Windows 8 marketplace.

But, the good news is (if all goes well), I'll finally be able to release games for PC (and to a much larger audience than XBLIG) by the end of the year.  Fingers crossed!

Cursed Cosmos (DBP 2012)

Just for fun, I submitted Cursed Cosmos to Dream.Build.Play 2012.  It still needs a lot of work, but it's presentable at least! :)

Here's a video of the Prologue from the version I submitted.

Anyway, I'm glad I was able to get it in a presentable state, and, hey, it'd be great if I won something.  But, I'm not holding my breath. :)

As for other things, I'm doing a bit of catching up, because I was on vacation recently and caught a nasty cold.  But, hopefully, I'll be back on track soon and will have some more "interesting" announcements in the weeks to come.

Have fun!

Little Snake, Big Scores (Pro Tip)

I thought I'd put up some more details on the scoring system in Snakester.

Every time you eat a dot, the score multiplier goes up by 1.  You then have 1 second to eat another.  If you don't the multiplier goes down by 1 every half second.  So, hitting 5 dots in a row quickly will get you 75 points (5 + 10 + 15 + 20 + 25).  If you ate 5 dots slowly, you'd only get 25 points (5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5).

With well-timed use of the turbo button, you can get the multiplier really high (I've gone over 300 points per dot, and I'm sure somebody can get it a lot higher than that).

Anyway, I hope this helps you get the most out of Snakester!

The 52,630 Point Challenge!

Win a free copy of Snakester by beating my current high score of 52,630 in the trial version of classic mode!*  Just contact me on twitter @eyehookgames, or drop me a line through the contact page.

There's already been one winner with a score of 53,520!

And, for those of you that already own Snakester.  I'm curious to see if somebody can break 75,000.  Even better, if you put up a video of your high score run over 50K, I'd love to post a few here.

Have fun and good luck!

* I've got a limited # codes, so first come, first serve!

Snakester is Available Now!

Snakester is now available on the Xbox Indie Game Marketplace.

I had a great time making it, and I hope everybody enjoys playing it!

Check out the Snakester Page for more details.