Popfly Parting Present

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 coupled with internal Microsoft web services, contained code from other products, had other IP encumbrances, or otherwise wouldn’t be useful except in an MS data center. 

However, we were able to put together something for you – the Popfly Game Engine.  Now this is just the game engine – the part that plays the game data files.  It doesn’t include the creator (although it does contain enough reference information on the data files that someone could create a new one), nor any server-side support code – I took out the portions of the code that communicated with popfly.com for high scores, badges and the like.  However, I do think it’s an interesting bit of code showing how to create a simple game engine in C# on Silverlight.  This should also provide an avenue for those of you who would like to take the leap from the world of the GUI game builder, look under the covers to see how things work and actually get your hands dirty with some real code! 

When you check out the code, there’s a few steps described in the readme on obtaining some dependencies and game data files.  If you used the Popfly Game Downloader we released a few weeks back to grab your games, there’s also instructions on how to crack them open and grab the data files.

With that, check out the Ms-PL licensed code at Codeplex!