Philadelphia Unity Game Dev Meetup

I recently put together a new meetup for Unity game developers in Philadelphia. This will likely be held at City CoHo Philly Nexus, 2401 Walnut St., Suite 102, Philadelphia, PA (map), and on Monday evenings. The location is ideal, as Drexel University and UPenn are right down the block, and public transit is close by. You can either get off at Suburban Station (Comcast Center) or 30th Street (Amtrak) and Coho is right between the two. ...

July 19, 2014 · Dave Voyles

Apache Cordova integrated in Visual Studio for Multi-Device Hybrid App development

I’ve been pushing HTML5 cross platform applications for some time now. I frequently give talks on how to use tools like Telerik’s App Builder, Adobe’s PhoneGap Cloud, and my personal favorite, Intel’s XDK. You can find my open sourced Cordova app here. Previously, Cordova was a cumbersome command line tool for building cross platform HTML5 mobile apps. it was not fun, and was incredibly painful to use, due to the constantly outdated documentation. Even worse, even if you did get an HTML5 app running on Windows Phone, you didn’t have a debugger! ...

May 12, 2014 · Dave Voyles

Professional Game Development Tools

This post is part of 3 week series giving current and aspiring game devs the tools, resources, and advice they need to get started building for Windows. We also have a great video course on [game production basics](http://Game Production Basics) at Microsoft Virtual Academy. Visual Studio Community Edition visual-studio-logo You need an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, to write code for your games. Visual Studio Community edition is FREE from Microsoft, and allows you to use a multitude of languages. ...

March 21, 2014 · Dave Voyles

Super Rawr-Type is released for Windows 8

Play Super Rawr-Type for FREE in the Windows 8 Store Super Rawr-Type, my 2D sidescrolling JavaScript shooter, is finally available for Windows 8. I actually finished working on it in August, but needed to change a few lines of code to have it pass certification, and completely forgot to resubmit. On Friday I made the final necessary changes, submitted, and it’s up in the store today. The project is open source, and you can find my GitHub here. ...

February 25, 2014 · Dave Voyles

I’ve decided to finally release my game

I’ve decided to finally release my game. And by release, I mean submit it to playtesting, take some brief feedback, and then finally place it into peer review. Once it passes that it can be released on XBLIG. I’m doing this for a few reasons: 1) Learning It’s nice to have feedback from other developers in terms of how the game plays and how to make corrections. It’s essentially a pong clone, so I wanted to start simple, as it serves as a way for me to learn both C# and XNA. In that regard it has done its job. I feel as though it’s run its course at the moment and that I can learn more from others developers and players than to continue on as I am. ...

July 13, 2012 · Dave Voyles

Dream.Build.Play dev diary 2

Just placeholder art for now Update: I’ve found the thread where in the App Hub where I got the original idea for the powerups. It is now linked. This is part 2 of my Dream.Build.Play journal, where I outline what it’s like to learn the technical side of XNA and C#. You can find my first part here. As I mentioned in my previous posting, a few members of the XNA community have been key in helping me learn the ins and outs along the way. I was looking for a framework to build my game on top of, and in doing so I came across a few which caught my attention, but Oneksoft’s Basic Starter Kit really had a lot of features that I was looking for. He frequently updates it, which gives you an added incentive to check out the page often as well. Essentially it is a combination of items from developers within the community, all of which are designed to make the experience of a novice developer easier. ...

May 1, 2012 · Dave Voyles

The Indie Games Summer Uprising site is up!

We’ve finally launched the Indie Games Summer Uprising site! Josh Addison, Nathan Smith, and Chris Brousseau have all done an outstanding job with the web design, art work, and initial launch trailer. You can find more of their work at Blazing Forge Games and Game Production Studios. In addition to the site, we’ve released the initial launch trailer and press release to a number of outlets. Be sure to “Like” us on Facebook as well, where you will have the opportunity to vote for two additional titles that you would like to see as part of the uprising. Click through for the press release. ...

July 5, 2011 · Dave Voyles

Death Sentence website is live!

See, I really do make games and not just write about them! Take a gander at the site I created for Death Sentence. It is still very It’s a great team so far, and I’ve been fortunate enough to hop on, although later in development to work as both an environment artist and web developer. It is a vahicular combat title in a similar vein to Twisted Metal. We’ve created it using the latest Unreal Engine, and it should have a release on the PC and perhaps iOS at some point after.

June 23, 2011 · Dave Voyles