It’s very difficult to estimate the piracy rate of PC games, and even more to estimate the impact on the sales. For my last game Spring Up Harmony, I found out that the piracy rate is 96% (!). Higher that I’d thought, really. Read the details below and find out how I obtained this number. The […]
Spring Up Harmony : Update 0.14
I just uploaded a new version of Spring Up Harmony (version 0.14). Direct download here. Changes: – Improvement and optimization of network transfers for online rankings. This change was required as the score files starts to get big. – Faster global rank update animation – Faster points animation
Spring Up Harmony available on PC Windows!
Finally, Spring Up Harmony is now officially available on PC Windows! You can download it here: http://www.frozax.com/suh/blog/springupharmony_setup.exe Have a look at the new trailer: If you want to talk about Spring Up Harmony on your site or blog, you can download hi-res screenshots here. Please help us getting coverage by talking about our game to […]
Spring Up Harmony PC – Rewards and Tips
Hi, the release of Spring Up Harmony PC will probably happen in the following weeks. Here is a post about the rewards included in the game and some tips for the hard ones. Beginner: Complete the first level of the game Top Scorer: Score 200,000 points in one level. Tip: Choose your level carefully when […]
My Experience Converting from XNA Game Studio 3.1 to 4.0
Microsoft released a big update to XNA Game Studio with version 4.0. The main improvement is Windows Phone 7 support. I will probably not develop for WP7 (see reasons below) but I still need to upgrade my current Xbox 360 project from XNA 3.1 to 4.0. The process was not as smooth as I though […]
Spring Up Harmony Postmortem and Sales Statistics
Spring Up Harmony (trailer) is my first game for the XBL Indie Games platform. Here is a quick postmortem about this game. Development Length I worked part-time (a few hours a day, with many days off) on the game from December to May/June (6 months). Before that, I worked on another cancelled project for 2 […]
Spring Up Harmony : List of reviews
A little more than two weeks after the release of Spring Up Harmony, I think most of the reviews are posted. Here is a quick list of the ones I could find. Reviews: XBLARatings (8/10) DIYGamer Review (+first impressions) Xbox360Digest (3/5) 1UP TeamKobun (4/5) GoFanboy (8/10) XboxHornet (7/10) Gamer With Casts Small articles: Destructoid Examiner […]
Spring Up Harmony is LIVE!
Finally, after nearly three weeks of submission, Spring Up Harmony went live on the marketplace Monday. I really hope players will like the game. I you try the game, feel free to post any feedback (both positive and negative) here! Even though I will spend some time doing marketing, I already have a few ideas […]
3 Simple Tips to Avoid Memory Allocations with XNA/C#
Long time without posting. I’ve spent a lot of time working on the game, contracting art, buying sound effect and music assets, designing the levels… New screenshots/video should come very soon. Anyway, back on topic: when developing from C++ to C#, I found out very strange that you can allocate memory but you cannot free […]
Yes, multi-threading in XNA/C# can be that simple!
Multi-threading is often causing problems for multiple reasons: synchronization, deadlocks, concurrent access to memory… But with my recent experience with multi-threading in XNA/C#, you can really do simple and efficient optimizations. While looking for possible performance improvements in Spring Up Harmony for Xbox 360 (PC), I have seen a simple situation really suited for multi-threading. […]