I really, really need to post more often. It has been such a huge couple of weeks that I’m not sure where to start.

My full-time employer, Sierra Trading Post, sent me to TechEd in Atlanta. Before I worked as a developer, I ran the web marketing department for Sierra and have been to many conferences. But nothing like TechEd. The scale of the conference was mind-blowing. Ten thousand people, hundreds of booths, miles of walking, cerebellum-busting learning… it was an incredible experience.

One of the nights of the conference I went to a “Windows Phone Hackathon.” My coworker and I got the date wrong and almost missed it. We showed up at 10pm, three hours late and most of the people were gone. But I had the opportunity to pitch Whirlygig to some Microsoft people and got a free phone (Samsung Focus) to develop on. I also won $225 in Visa giftcards! So, even if Whirlygig doesn’t sell a single copy I can say that it made a little bit of money :P

Unfortunately, the free phone came with the condition that I have Whrilygig to market for Windows Phone by end of June. While this is not impossible, it will be very challenging. The Xbox version of Whirlygig is very close but it’s…an xbox version. I ported it to phone within a couple hours but there are a lot of problems with code reuse:

  • The screens have different aspect ratios. The xbox menus and levels were awkward and unpolished on the phone.
  • The graphics have different resolutions, I don’t want to try to run the size and volume of textures on WP7 that I’m pushing on xbox
  • The gui is different: it’s clickable on the phone
  • The game is different: the xbox game is a multi-player arena battle. The phone game is a single player vs hoard game.
  • All of these differences would mean a lot of conditional compiling, asset loading and potential for a whole host of bugs.

So, on Saturday morning I decided to see how hard it would be to create an entirely new project for WP7 and manually move code over, revising content as needed. By late that morning I had recreated, revised and even improved my whole menu GUI. By the end of the weekend I had a simple level and player controls working and actually rolled it on my physical device (as opposed to just the emulator).

So, how does this affect Whirlygig Xbox? To be honest, it adds a slight delay. But, the good news is that Verizon just announced a WP7 phone so you can get one on a larger variety of networks now :)

I’ll be posting soon about what I love about mine and what I dislike. For now, here’s my development roadmap:

  • June 4th – Submit Whirlygig: Dream Build Play version (not as complete as I want the final market release)
  • June 31st – Have Whirlygig WP7 on Phone marketplace
  • July 31st – Submit Whilrygig Xbox360 to Peer review
  • July – September – Support and improvements for released games
  • Q4 – Depends on market response to Whirlygig games!

Finally, here’s a video of current progress on WP7 version: