Silverlight at Gamefest

This week I had the privilege of attending and helping with some Silverlight in casual games presentations at the XNA Gamefest conference happening in Seattle.  I say helping because the real game experts were there.

Two Silverlight presentations were given.  One by Bill Reiss/Joel Neubeck and the other by Mike Snow.  Between the two sessions we covered concepts in Silverlight game development as well as a walk-through of starting out to create a simple game.  I consider these guys to be the foremost experts on the topic given their experience in creating games like Dr. Popper, Stack Attack, Zero Gravity, Zombomatic and Tunnel Trouble.  Mike also will be posting some game frameworks as well as demonstrating some multi-player aspects.

It was a decent turnout for those interested in learning where Silverlight plays in casual games.  We also were able to talk with the MSN Games teams that gave us an understanding of what would be needed to implement a game in Silverlight.  I was surprised to see how simple the initial process is to get a game in the pipeline for consideration of MSN Games.  So if you have some thoughts on writing a game in Silverlight and want a distribution channel…consider MSN Games!

Silverlight Game Contest!

Need some incentive?  How about a Silverlight game contest?  TeamZone Sports is sponsoring a contest…with some cash prizes.  Official rules are coming soon, but you can sign up to be notified here.  I’m excited to see what comes out of the contest!

XNA and Silverlight?

With the announcement at XNA that the XNA Community games are going to be opened up wider so that anyone can essentially write an XBOX game and have other community members consume it, I suspect people will be jumping at those opportunities!  Maybe you want a game in multiple channels: XBOX, Windows, Zune, Web.  There are going to be things you may want to know in advance.  Bill did a demonstration of a single code base that ran on Windows (XNA), Zune (XNA for Zune) and Silverlight.  It was pretty cool to see the same experience in all those different platforms.  Bill had some good advice on things to look for when developing for this goal…maybe he’ll append those to the post (hint, hint).  You can download his sample code here.

Thanks to MSN Casual Games for inviting Silverlight to the conference (and for the sweet swag).  Thanks to Bill and Joel as our MVPs in this area for representing their experiences and sharing their knowledge with us.  Thanks to Mike for sharing his expertise and be on the lookout for him to provide some source on how he accomplished some multi-player game play within Silverlight using sockets.