My recent XNA game (Taptitude) on Windows Phone 7 is doing pretty good now that we’ve released the first 4 mini-games free. In making Taptitude we decided to use WCF REST’ful web services to implement leaderboards. Being a total n00b at writing...

  My first XNA game for Windows Phone 7 is out the door.  One thing that is nice about XNA is that I was able to leverage a ton of code from my previous Xbox 360 game (Wayne The Brain).  This time around we decided to do a collection of...

Trial mode is an important part of every XNA game.  It gives the player a taste of the gameplay, and wets their appetite for what they can expect after purchasing the full license.  It’s therefore important to understand how to best implement...

Until recently I never really saw the point of embedding a scripting language in your game.  I’m already pretty good with C#, so why would I want to use some other language to write game code?  I don’t' have a staff of level designers that can...

I’m giving away a bunch of redeem codes on Reddit today.  Leave some feedback in the comments for a redeem code.

Wayne the Brain has passed peer review and is now available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace for 80pts ($1 US).   If you like fun physics games, then give it a try.  You can download it from the Marketplace->Indie Games section of the Xbox Dashboard...

Today (at 4pm PST) I’m giving a talk via Live Meeting about how you can use UI animations in your game to give it the extra polish that’s needed to stand out in a crowded marketplace.   For more information about how to tune in to this talk please...

My brother Nathan and I have been working on an XNA Game Studio game called “Wayne The Brain” for the past few months. Recently we completed the game and submitted it to peer review. If you’re a creators club member, we would really appreciate a review...

When you look at most of the sample code that’s out there for doing 2D XNA games you may notice that there is a tendency to sprinkle in the drawing code all over the place.  Simple samples/tutorials will put it directly in Game.Draw(…) while more...

One of my hobby projects (again, not Microsoft official) is a port of the Box2D physics engine.  My brother Nathan Furtwangler and I have been porting Box2D to C#/XNA and we recently posted it on CodePlex under the MIT license.  We call it Box2D...

In my last post I presented my declarative XNA animation library called ZoomEngine.Animation.  This time I want to step back and look at how all of the pieces fit together, and show how you can extend the library in your own game. Lets start with...

ZoomEngine.Animation is a lightweight, easy to use, and powerful declarative animation library for XNA Game Studio. As a gift for those who found my newly revived blog, I decided to share it with you. It’s a small part of a larger game engine called...

This blog hasn't been very active since I created it, but that's about to change. I recently moved from teams from WPF to the XNA Game Studio Framework team within Microsoft. That means this blog is now going to focus on XNA & Game Development. Here...

Last week Jordan Parker and I were looking at a chunk of code that was evidently leaking memory. What we discovered wasn't obvious at first so I thought I'd share it with the world. The code looked something like this: void BackgroundThreadProc() {...

Rich runtime support for animation is a key component of WPF and a lot can be said about it. That is why I've started this multi part series of posts on the topic of having fun with WPF animations. Typically application animations are used as subtle...

Hello world. Yes, another blog has just been born. I feel obligated to say a bit about what this blog is going to be about, so here it goes. I'm a developer at Microsoft on the WPF team, so much of the content here will relate to WPF. On the other...