Browse by Tags

Moving the Popfly Game Creator engine from Silverlight 1 to 2
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 Read More...
Performance Tips (Part 2)
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 Read More...
Performance Tips (Part 1)
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 using Read More...
Popfly September Update
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 Read More...
Popfly Game Creator at PAX
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 Read More...
Rainbow Duckies - Great post on creating games with grandchildren
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 Read More...
Capping your actor’s speed
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 Read More...
Mailbag: Even Easier Music
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, Read More...
Creating Music for Popfly Game Creator
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 Read More...
Editing the appearance of Actors, Scenes etc…
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 Read More...
Introduction
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 . Read More...

Search

This Blog

Syndication

Page view tracker