The Right Moves

It’s been a while since my last post as the new projects I’m working on are still not publicly released.  However, last night I spent some time updating the Popfly Game Engine project on codeplex to get Popfly games running on Windows Phone 7 Series...

http://www.popfly.com closed its doors for good this Monday.  One of the questions we got quite a bit was whether we could release the source code in some form.  Unfortunately for most of Popfly, this wasn’t really possible – it was either tightly...

By now you’ve probably heard the sad news that come August, http://www.popfly.com will be shutting down.  You can read more about the details here .  While we’ll miss the site and working on it, the team has moved on to new and exciting projects...

So the thing I’ve always found to be the biggest PITA about “web app” development is the classic DOM/JavaScript circular reference issue (I’m pretty sure this applies to both Firefox and IE and probably others).  The DOM is COM (or XPCOM) based and...

In our most recent Popfly update, we shipped the project I’ve been working on for the last couple months (along with Patrick Wong, Tim Rice and help from the rest of the team), which is a fully backwards compatible game engine, completely rewritten from...

Yesterday we began our discussion of performance optimizations in Popfly Game Creator .   In that post we discussed how collision detection impacts performance as you add actors and ways to mitigate that impact.  Today I’d like to talk a bit...

I started playing around with Twitter recently and have been having a lot of fun.  Some of you may have noticed that I added a Twitter gadget to the blog sidebar here which allows readers to see my feed.  The block was created using the Popfly...

While we’re constantly working to improve the performance of the Popfly Game Creator , there are a number of tweaks you can make to your games right now to improve your users’ frame rate. Right now, there are two main bottlenecks for games created...

While I’ve been working on a super secret (ok, just regular secret and probably not exciting to anyone but me) project the last month which you won’t see for a bit, the rest of the Popfly team found time in between actually super (and secret) projects...

At PAX, one part of my presentation/demo on Popfly was creating the game Lander from scratch.  It was a hit with the crowd so I decided to do a screencast of an extended version of the demo which creates a full version of Lander (for the presentation...

For those of you in the Seattle area this coming weekend for PAX , be sure to stop by the Microsoft booth if you’re interested in checking out the Popfly Game Creator.  I will be giving a demos of the PGC Friday at 5:00, as well as Saturday and Sunday...

We’ve been hard at work on new features for the Popfly Game Creator since first launching this May.  I took some time to demo new features in the following video: You can also check out Adam’s blog for more info here and here , find games you haven...

Look Mom, I made you something: Happy Mother's Day! For those of you who are not my mom, the above game is my take on Plato's Allegory of the Cave (my Mom is a Philosophy and Religious Studies professor at the University of Idaho ).  I made the game...

It’s now been one week since we first released Popfly Game Creator to the public at Maker Faire and on the web on May 2nd.  I thought I’d take today to point out some of the cool games that people have made.  User zbuff001 made this challenging...

Michael Leonard is another engineer on the Popfly team and just posted a great entry on the experience he had testing the Popfly Game Creator with his granddaughters. It really is a great example of the interactions you can have when you're not just playing...

If you’ve been playing around with Popfly Game Creator long enough, you’ve probably noticed that if actors get going fast enough, they can sometimes manage to fly right through a wall.  There are some things you can do to get around this like making...

Reader Michael Sterling pointed out today (or rather late last night) a neat tool that lets you create music even more easily than with Finale: For people who want even easier music creation so are willing to give up some of the nuance that Finale offers...

Sound and music is probably one of the most overlooked areas of new hobbyist game developers. Just adding a cheesy soundtrack and cute hopping and squishing noises subtly changes a boring, simple game into one that feels professional and complete . The...

One thing you’ll probably notice in our UI is that most of the options for editing the appearance of an item in PGC are grayed out (because we haven’t implemented them yet…). Luckily, all the visual elements in PGC are Silverlight 1.0 XAML and there are...

Today we went live with the Popfly Game Creator Alpha!  What’s the Popfly Game Creator?  It’s an online tool for creating web based games similar to the casual games you’ve probably wasted hours playing when you should have been studying/working...

Hi, I’m Ben Anderson, a developer on the Microsoft Non-Professional Tools team. I recently joined the team to work on the newly released Popfly Game Creator . Prior to that I worked on the Visual C++ team and before that, I went to Carleton College ....