In a recent post, I talked about the ICHealthHack event in London where many medical students gathered in order to win prizes and try to make the lives of children with Cystic Fibrosis easier, or at least more fun, when performing their daily treatment exercises.
As a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional), out helping my community of game developers and technology peeps, I am often asked to talk at some event, speak at a user group or support a community in its open source work. in short, donating my free time to help others in a developer way.
MonoGame (for those of you not yet aware) is a Game Building Framework / API born from the ashes that was the Microsoft XNA Framework that provides a very easy to use API to build games. (or 3D Apps)
For my sins, I was asked back to FutureDecoded again this year to give a talk on the Microsoft UWP platform, specifically about bringing games to the XboxOne using UWP. By all accounts the session went well (especially as there was standing room only by the time the talk started). With it being just two days in the London ExCeL exhibition center, not everyone who wanted to make it could, in fact even some people were contacting me on the day saying they were in other sessions at that time but wanted more info.
Working with assets with projects and games is hard enough these days, from finding the right artist, tweaking and reviewing the content and then faced with the trouble of how best to import and manage it in your game. The problem is the same no matter which game engine or framework you turn to for your game production.
Getting your game to as many platforms as possible is (should) be the dream for any game developer or studio. In the markets of today, if you are only hitting one platform, ultimately you are not achieving your potential and are losing out on sales.
To accompany the video project for the walkthrough of building multi-platform solutions with MonoGame, this blog post will walk you through some best practices and tips and tricks for starting and managing your MonoGame projects, with the aim to take them to as many platforms as possible with the least amount of pain.
To accompany the video project for the Content Project/pipeline tool, this blog post will also show you all the features of the MGCB tool, along with a few tips and tricks.
Technology it seems is moving ever faster and faster, especially in the world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Barriers to entry are breaking down and huge cloud offerings from all the major suppliers are popping up left right and center. We see these on our devices (Siri, Cortana, Google Now), in our browsers yet to date, it is being used mainly for one thing it seems, Ads (joy).
Do you like making money? Or would you like to see your app in front of more users? Then read on.
By now, everyone should have watched or at least heard about the Build2016 keynote announcements from Phil Spenser about development for Xbox One and the opening up / enablement (at long last) of the public “Developer mode”, something long since sought after since the days of XBLIG on the 360 and the previous promises made by the ID@Xbox team about the future of indie development on Microsoft’s latest console.
*edit, updated the article to also support the later “Anniversary” and “Creators” updates, which need a few tweaks, especially with an updated VoiceCommandFile Format.
Still working on updating the Unity Sample to 5.6, as Unity changed the UWP exported solution which breaks the project if you try to export it again.
True speech interaction is something we don’t see very often in gaming. Sure, you have recorded audio for NPCs and a few non-silent protagonists, but it’s very rare for the player to interact with speech themselves.