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!

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!

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!

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 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.

I ended up throwing away the original concept and decided to make a few game modes that were more closely aligned with the classic, but with a few added twists...

First off, I kept the "analog" snake from my original concept.  It definitely adds more strategy (particularly in the co-op modes).  And, for fun, I added "turbo" to the right trigger, which doubles the snake's speed.  As it turns out, it works quite nicely with the multiplier system I added.  To achieve really high scores requires a lot of speed and a lot of precision.  So, it really feels like those two concepts work well together.

The co-op modes give you and a friend control of a two headed snake.  It's hard, but a lot of fun (imho).

(Footage of some not-so-graceful co-op action in Snakester)

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy Snakester!  It should be coming soon!

I think I'm going to spend a few more days on it to add sound and multiplayer (co-op & vs), and hopefully put it in playtest by the weekend.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about Cursed Cosmos!

SNAKESTER!!!

It's a mashup of classic Snake and everybody's favorite party game from the 70's.  What's not to love?

Basically, you guide the snake around and try to match the colored parts of the snake to the colored rings on the playfield.  Not rocket science, but I'm having fun making it.

Anyway, we'll see if I get it done by my deadline, but I think I have a good chance, since I have the concept and gameplay working now.  Basically I just need to add levels to it, playtest for fun factor, and hopefully time for graphical bling!

Cursed Loot style encounters are also now implemented, and we have a lot of fun ideas for them.  Beyond that, the ultimate plan is to have a (light) story arc that results in a final boss battle, but that work still needs to be done!

Lastly we've been working on navigation and have implemented a nearby "point of interest" ring that you can bring up with the "B" button that points out nearby star systems, asteroid fields, and encounters, as well as a more traditional map that shows some of the surrounding area (although it's still less that 1% of the overall galaxy... tbd if we'll support zooming or something else...).

Anyway, that's about it.  We feel we've been pretty productive, but still so much more work to be done!

Next up: more encounters, new enemies, a big boss, and a ton of audio work.

To date, Cursed Loot has had 6,677 trials and 4,442 purchases which comes to about $3,100 in the past four months.  So, we're not getting rich here, but at least it buys lunch!  The numbers for December are pretty interesting, with 519 trials converting to 500 purchases--that's over a 95% conversion rate!  So, no complaints there.  Now, if only we could get everybody with an Xbox to try out Cursed Loot, we'd be rich! :)

A lot of this year was spent on several different games, improving our game engine, and learning some nifty new tricks.  But, now, we're firmly focused on finishing development of Cursed Cosmos.  The Cursed Cosmos engine is working great and we are mostly focused on adding new content at this point.  You can definitely look forward to Cursed Loot style encounters, a ton of upgrades for your ship, a good number of enemies, asteroid mining, and... wait for it... boss battles!

After Cursed Cosmos is out the door, odds are that we will be looking at other platforms.  Right now, I'm pretty excited about doing something on iOS, but PC is definitely a possibility as well.  And, of course, I'd love to do another content patch for Cursed Loot.

I also wanted thank everybody for your emails, comments, tweets, and forum posts.  They've been a huge motivational boost and a great source of inspiration.  You all are great!

That's it!  Have a happy new year and see you in 2012!