Lecture At ESNE University About Middleware And Game Engines

Last week i had a lecture at ESNE University about "Middleware and game engines". This lecture was part of a group of conferences which you can check it out here. The objective was gave students a clear view about middleware and game engines used in game development today. So i told about middleware like Havok, Kynapse, etc. and Unreal Engine 3 as game engine. I recommend you to check it out but (like my other lecture) only if you are good in spanish.


Middleware and Game Engines

Radio Program About Game Development Process

Last wednesday (at 6:30 am) was given on radio program an interview in which i took part as guest speaker. The interview was conducted by Joaquín Pérez Iglesias, a National University of Distance Education (UNED in spanish) teacher and a friend of mine. The radio program was recorded in the radio studio at UNED a couple of weeks ago and as can you read in the title of this blog entry is about Game Development Process in general. So i recommend you hear it (if you understand more or less spanish spoken) .

IT magazine at UNED radio: Game Development Process

Lecture At Rey Juan Carlos University About Current Trends In Game Development

Last friday i had a lecture at Rey Juan Carlos University about "Current trends in game development". This lecture is part of "Master en Informática Gráfica, Juegos y Realidad Virtual" lectures and the objective was gave students a clear view about "real life" game development based on experience. Also i told about new channels of game developmet as could be XBOX LIVE Arcade or XBOX LIVE Community Games. I recommend you to check it out but only if you are good in spanish. I will try to have this site as up to date as possible.


Current Trends in Game Development

Working With Pocoyo

I have to say sorry for such a long time without writing anything here... but you know motivation is a huge factor to take into account when you're dealing with your own projects., blogs, etc. Fortunately i start a new path at Zinkia the creators of Pocoyo animation series to work on an unannounced Nintendo Wii game based on the Pocoyo's franchise as a senior game programmer. I'm really exited about this opportunity of improvement in my career and i hope everything is going to be ok. I promise the next post will be something relative to XNA.

XNA Community Games

It's been a while from my last post!. I have to confess, i've been playing GTAIV too much!. So it's time to return to the earth and do something interesting with my spare time. In the meantime you can check the new look of the XNA Creators club site and learn something about XNA Community Games which is in beta process. I'm working on a new game which i hope to publish through this way so i'll try to post some articles related to the game. Enjoy!

Hall Of Fame

Yesterday i was watching the Microsoft keynote at GDC 2008 and suddenly a screenshot of my remake of Bubble & Bobble appear on my tv. It was fantastic! so thank you very much to Microsoft for took a picture of my game and put it in that huge screen. You can read a complete review of the keynote at Joystiq. Now if you look at in the first row and sixth column of the image you can see a screenshot of my game.

XNA news at GDC 2008

At this year GDC there are some interesting things about XNA. Xbox LIVE Community Games, XNA Game Studio 3.0 and a good article at Gamasutra about the process of submission to Xbox LIVE. Don't forget to check them out.

Test Driven Development

A long time from my last post! anyway it's time to learn something interesting about test driven development. I used to design my programs and software in a different way but from now i going to use this stuff in the tutorials. So for .Net i'm using TestDriven.NET a free addond for Visual Studio which let you run your test in a different process inside the IDE. TestDriven.NET use internally NUnit a unit-testing framework for all .Net languages, i recommend you to try this tools to be confortable with. There is a good tutorial about this here. TestDriven.NET and NUnit solve your problems with dynamic testing but when you need to test something like the GUI of a game, a scroll, etc. You need a proper way to do static testing. So i provide you an example of using static testing, a silly application based on the Game class of the XNA framework which test a little HUD. I hope you enjoy with it and discover the new methodology. Stay tuned for the new tutorials, the first one is going to be about the Collada Pipeline, so we'll do an XNA Collada importer and processor.

Static Testing Example (Windows version)

XNA Game Studio 2.0 Released

Yes!, you can download it and check it out. Enjoy!. Btw, i working on a litle bit tutorial about test driven development, i thought that would be interesting to use this stuff in the next tutorials. So get ready to enjoy a lot.

XNA Articles

In the following weeks i'm going to publish some articles about different topics in game programming. Everything will be programmed with XNA Game Studio 2.0, so may be you could be interested in some of them. The list of topics which i'm going to deal with is:

• Collada pipeline
  
• Finite state machines (FSMs)
• Shader series
• Multithreading in XBOX360
• Networking

It could be nice if you would write any advice or suggestion, something that would be interesting for you. As i said in my first post, your interest is welcome.