Our friends over at Sarcastic Gamer posted some new Surface goodness this morning. It's an early "proof of concept" game called Firefly that was developed by the Carbonated Games folks downstairs. While we've done other games during the course of the product this is among the first casual games to test the SDK. In fact that was CG's mission...test out our SDK and do a little bug bashing (and they took the task literally).

Here's Doc and I...just before I beat him royally (several times)!

And here's a close-up of the action. The goal is to take advantage of the multi-touch capability Surface offers and use your fingers to gently guide fireflies into a jar where you trap them. You earn points by collecting sets of fireflies.

It's a simple game, but that was the intent. Doubt it will ever see the light of day for people to play though. The team just wanted to kick the tires on the SDK. We actually have a video we'll post where we meet the team that developed the game and they play around with it. 

And for the record...Doc only beat me once!

Cheers,

K

So if you've been watching NBC's revival of American Gladiators you may have noticed a familiar face...

http://www.nbc.com/American_Gladiators/contestants/monica_carlson.shtml

That same Monica happens to be the model in all of our Surface web videos. Seriously!

And she's tough too...she holds the second best time among women in the competition.

 The entire Surface team is pulling for ya Monica as you compete in the finals this Sunday. Make us proud!

A few of us will be at MIX08 in Vegas next month.  August and Daniel from the UX team will be participating in some cool sessions in the UX track (you can search for them by name here to find those sessions).  Also, Tasneem and I from the SDK team will be hanging out in the "sandbox" area with demo tables - we aren't announcing anything new about the SDK but we're looking forward to talking to developers and designers about what excites them and what challenges they face when using the latest Microsoft tools/frameworks.

I hear that the conference is nearly sold out, but if you're attending please stop by and chat!

-Robert