BitCore Studios LLC

Xbox Live Indie Game Dev Update

I have currently sent Version 1.1 of the patch for Mystic Mayhem on the App Hub, this version adds the following updates:

– Slower Menu Selection Speed

– Updated Menu to Showcase the different modes of the game (show it is two games in one!)

– Fixed coin value value in Survival Mode

– Removed rumble on projectile shoot.

– Updated some graphics elements.

These updates will hopefully be out in the next couple of days.

Android Progress

Currently I have been learning MonoGame and trying to port Mystic Mayhem to Android devices. So far i have been making some progress, but found some snags. First, MonoGame currently does not support hardware instancing in their codebase [Develop3d Branch], this means I will have to do some workarounds to get the graphics to display properly on less powerful graphics cards.Second, I will have to find an alternative way to get the music to work, somehow the audio causes some faults which I had to comment my Audio Manager code in order for the port to work.

Next, I will have to tackle scaling, since Android devices can support various sizes, I will have to add a scaling manager to scale from the traditional Xbox 1280 x 720 to any size possible. Also during my first port test of my game I was getting some “run out of space” when trying to deploy to the emulator. After some quick searching I found out that even though the game is < 70MB, when debugging it almost doubles its size to add debug handlers when sending to Android device. In order to fix it you have to run the emulator for the first time from the command prompt to add a partition size when it starts up:

emulator -partition-size 512 -avd <Your Mono AVD Name here>

otherwse it defaults to a low disk size (194MB of free if I recall).

I will try to keep an update of the games progress porting Mystic Mayhem (which is out now on XBLIG!) to Android as much as I can.