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Friday, August 7, 2009

Please Save the Great Flea Circus!

After two weeks in development I am happy to announce the release of my first game - "The Great Flea Circus". You can play it in a few nice places that host Silverlight games.




What's with the name "The Great Flea Circus"? Well, the game is a clone of Circus Atari and hence the circus part. The flea part came because the characters I initially drew looked like fleas. Hence I made the theme a Flea circus instead of a regular circus!

The main purpose of this game was to test the feasibility of using Silverlight for game development - And I have concluded it is not only feasible it is absolutely the most productive way to develop a game given my .NET background.

Also after my previous post I have decided to switch to using Microsoft Expression Blend for the game development. Particularly I have been using the Behaviors feature in Silverlight to separate game logic(code) and game design(in Blend). For example in the Blend design window I just attach the behavior Paddle to the paddle in the designer and Jumper to the two jumpers.

An interesting thing happened where behaviors were really useful - When I showed the game to my wife (A great play tester and critic !) she asked me why there is ball in the middle of the screen which doesn't interact with the Jumpers. So I added the Bounce behavior(which the two black blocks on the sides have) to the ball and viola!, the Jumpers now bounce off the ball in the middle. It turned out to be a nice twist to the gameplay and so I left it in. Also check out the cheesy animation I put on the Ferris wheel in the background through Blend.

More on Silverlight, Blend and Behaviors in a later post. Now go and "Please Save the Great Flea Circus!! "
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5 comments:

  1. CROSAugust 7, 2009 at 10:52 AM

    Hey, thanks for throwing your game up on Game Jolt! Glad to have you around.

    ReplyDelete
  2. GauravDAugust 8, 2009 at 9:26 AM

    Vindhya, what do I have to do (accomplish?) to see the cheesy ferris wheel animation?

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  3. UnknownAugust 8, 2009 at 9:58 AM

    Oh - if you notice carefully the rim of the Ferris wheel is spinning :) Actually the spokes don't rotate. Just wanted to see how animation can be done but didn't have time to do anything proper.

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  4. Vishnu S IyengarNovember 14, 2009 at 4:42 AM

    haha. Kinda fun. But I assume there's no goal other than keeping the fleas jumping as long as possible? :)

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  5. UnknownNovember 16, 2009 at 11:12 PM

    Nope - It was just something I released quickly just to get a hang of Silverlight and get things going. The next one will have a more gameplay and story.

    And as they say - Write your first ten games quickly - Because they are all gonna suck.

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