Uber Geek Games is showing off a WP7 port of their game Dungeon Adventure which is available on Xbox now. Since it’s in XNA the code is mostly reused. Here’s how they describe the game:
Classic Roguelike action, right in your living room! Retro ASCII graphics, an infinite number of random dungeons to loot, and Global Scoreboards to prove you’re the best.
Global Scoreboards – saves your highest scores for local and online highscores
Keyboard and ChatPad support for precise movement
Radial selection for accurate movement, even with a stock Xbox controller
Challenging Awards to unlock
Highly configurable graphics – choose from color or monochrome,
Graphical or ASCII, and remap them however you like.
Multiple zoom levels from close up to a bird’s eye view of the dungeon
For all you Flash coders out there, Robin Debreuil has just released the Swf2XNA program to leverage your skills into WP7 games. To quote him
Swf2XNA is now live! This is an open source (BSD) program that allows you to make Windows/XBox/Win7 games by leveraging Flash for assets and layout, as well as using Box2D visually. It makes 2D games in XNA quite simple to make!
Development on Windows Phone 7 seems to have increased since Microsoft announced they were providing devices to developers, and this is one of the new apps that has come out of that.
Created by the Phone7 blog owner, the application is a very simple concept that is known to many people in the North America and Europe. The concept of ICE translates to In case of Emergency, so if your every in need to talk to someone after an incident, you should be saving their number under ICE.
Mishkin Faustini, the Dirty Developer, has created this nice-looking application in just in just one day using Microsoft’s Expression Blend application design tool.
The app is not fully functional yet and is hard-coded in many places, but Mishkin plans to expand it by linking BART stations to their corresponding schedules.
Microsoft a lot about their DeepZoom Silverlight technology, a brilliant display of it is the site at Mix.Zoomery.com, where the website presents 1.2 Gigapixels of information in a beautiful and easily digestible format.
The web application also translated very easily to a Windows Phone 7 application, as can be seen below, with claimed over 90% of code re-use.
Got the "World Cup is over soon" blues? Here's an app that might cheer you up then, so make sure you use it these last few days!
From the developer:
Whether you’re supporting Spain, Holland, Germany or Uruguay, the WP7 Vuvuzela app’s for you. Pick your team and off you go. Enjoy the traditional, relaxing sound of the vuvuzela as you immerse yourself in the game. I realise it loses something in spontaneity give you don’t have a WP7 device (neither do I) and so have to run it on the emulator on your laptop. But hey, it’s a great emulator and you wouldn’t want to be seen with the iPhone version – terribly passe.
A small diversion form the apps posts going on here normally is this piece of news of a persistent database available for app developers.
Perst™ is an object-oriented, open source embedded database solution available for the Windows Phone 7 platform. Great news for developers planning to write business solution apps for WP7.
Written by the firm APPA Mundi from Birmingham England. Andy Wigley, a MS MVP, claims:
Using Perst for .NET, developers using Silverlight can now include true database management system features in their Silverlight applications, including adding persistence to this data by storing it in a container file in isolated storage
This is a helper app for all Muslims, it can help you with keeping track of the time, even if you are out traveling. It also utilizes Bing maps to help you locate a Mosque in the city you are in.
Here's a game in a very early version, the developer says it's in pre-alpha.
I think you are supposed to collect fruit that the monkey's throws at you. It looks like this. Unfortunately I can't link the vid as the developer hasn't allowed it on my domain.
The XBox game Shot 1UP is being ported to Windows Phone 7. It's a pure shoot-em up and looks like it could give even the most hardened action game player a proper seizure!
Check the vid out below for action of the XBox version.
A word game where you get 7 letters (one is locked but I presume based on the level of play there are more or less letters) but you need to spell that longest word you can with the letters you have to beat the clock. Spelling words that are longer or doing it faster adds more time to the clock.
Currently in development, NextWar: The Quest for Earth for Windows Phone 7 devices is a port of NextWar for the Xbox 360. It is slated to be released with the official launch of Windows Phone 7 this coming holiday season.
SilverTranslate is a simple Bing powered translation app. Enter text in one language on top and it converts it to the language of your choice at bottom by using Bing’s translate feature (so it’s all over the air). Here it is in action:
It’s a WP7 port of MyTrainLog which lets you enter complex workout plans, with sets and supersets and with no restrictions. Here’s a glimpse of it in action which is noted as a ‘very rough first impression’:
Some people were concerned that WP7 wouldn’t have a lot of multiplayer real time games. The reasons is because MS did not provide some developer tools for this. MS provided turn by turn games (like chess) but not real time multiplayer games where both players play simultaneously. Anyway, here’s a clip of a multiplayer online chess game.
The developer also has additional functions here. You can watch others playing online, attend a chess lecture, practice endgames and configure your account.
Today; another one of Andy Beaulieu's projects, Boss Launch 2: Zombie Attack.
This is the much-awaited sequel to Boss Launch, titled "Boss Launch 2: Zombie Attack" - in which you use your (normally useless) boss to take out a Zombie horde as you progress through many challenging levels. Things get interesting when you interact with vehicles (such as jumping into the back of a truck).
The game Frozen Bubble is being ported to XNA to get it over to Windows Phone 7.
The developer writes:
I am currently porting Frozen Bubble from perl to C# XNA. My goal is to have the game up and running under Windows Phone 7. Currently everything works except menu’s and multiplayer. This is planned for one of the coming weeks. Stay tuned for updates!
Here is a Windows phone 7 application for tracking buses and the routes they follow in Chicago.
This app will make sure you never miss a bus, and perhaps more importantly, will make sure you know the best time to leave your house or office so you don’t end up standing and waiting at the bus stop for a ridiculous amount of time.
It takes full advantage of the Bing Maps Silverlight control to plot out exact GPS locations of buses and stops, making sure you always know the optimal time to leave.
BusTrack can even group your most frequent stops together by a “location” so you don’t have to bounce in and out of different routes that you might want take to your destination.
"Ahead" is a Windows Phone 7 application that lets you manage your projects on-the-go. Get tasks done according to priorities, time your work for any project, keep an eye on invoices you sent, make sure to remember your expenses... There are a lot of things you'll be able to do with your Windows Phone.
WeatherBug is the largest (their claim) private weather network in the world, and offers clients for many of the major mobile OS platforms, including Windows Mobile. They've now laid the groundwork for porting the WM client to WP7 and apparently its gone pretty smoothly. Unfortunately for those of us outside the US, WeatherBug doesn't offer the full range of functionality that's available inside the US, but the app is free for those of you who don't mind ads.
Another app is one for the London Tube which shows you their current status and pushes notifications to your phone if there are delays or problems. Similar programs exist on the iPhone for the NYC subway.
Paper Ball by Jimmy Interactive, which looks stylized enough to be something on an iPhone. Think of it as literally paper-football, where the paper are people cutouts. You direct your offense/defense by drawing their plot and then watch what happens. Looks to be a fun little time-waster and the graphics are just superb.
The new multiplayer game for windows mobile phones named Galaxies has been prepared by Ageye - a well known name in developing games. Like the Caver game, a side scrolling windows mobile using accelerometer, this windows phone app requires a device with an accelerometer. In WP7 game Galaxies your roll will be as an elite pilot who commands the elite combat ship in galaxies with full of enemies and you have to kill them.
Galaxies game Features :
Control the game using the accelerometer
Different alien classes up to 10
4 different level types
Number of levels unlimited
Real-time online multiplayer mode
Online high score for the single player and multiplayer mode
More physics love comes to WP7 from Andy Beaulieu. Like last time you can try this guy out online right now since it’s Silverlight based. You get to see physics, changes in perspective and gestures and he’s provided the source code. Check it out on his website. In an interesting note he talks about how this was created:
This Shuffleboard game was created as the basis for a Coding4Fun tutorial, which will be available soon on the C4F Website. I don’t want to spoil the fun for the official tutorial release so I won’t go into much detail here, but this demo should be helpful for folks wanting to quickly create physics based games for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices.
When the tutorial is released, it will include a video walkthrough showing step-by-step creation using Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4.
The app is a ‘dress up’ app where you can dress up characters in different clothing, etc. There’s certainly a market for that out there and this app seems to handle it well. The thing I’m more excited for is that their website features a series of XNA based games (including one for Zune) so their interest in WP7 hopefully means there are a few ports in the work…
Man the devs are really shining on WP7 already. Here’s an app from Nowsci that’s in final form (we just need phones:)). It’s a Goog RSS reader but it focuses on aesthetics and pre-caches data so there are no delays to pull data as you go through the app. Here’s the feature list:
Full access to labels, feeds, and all starred or unread items
Pre-buffering of articles as you read, just like the web version of Google Reader, to keep things moving without delay
Marking items, feeds, or labels read and unread
Starring your favorite items
Instant synchronization with your Google Reader account
Pretty neat little app here. It’s a diary. Go to the date and you get some options. You start by creating an image (if you want) with drawing tools and some preset icons and emoticons to insert and the like. It all seems easy to use. And once your done move on down and you can type and entry to go along with it. Why not take a look at it in action.
MetroTwit for your PC is now available as a beta download. It’s a Twitter app that has the look and feel of Metro – the WP7 theme. Features:
* If you ever want to read more tweets, just scroll down and more will appear almost instantly. Be careful though, it’s addictive and you could be scrolling for hours.
* You don’t have to switch away from what you’re doing to keep tabs on new tweets. A counter in the taskbar will tell you exactly how many unread messages there are.
* The people and topics you care about, at your fingertips. Simply start typing any part of a username or hashtag and we’ll find them for you.
* Read excerpts from new tweet updates as they cycle through in the notifications. If you run out of time, hover over the notifications to stop the countdown to read even more.
* Not all columns must be created equal. You have the choice and flexibility to control exactly how your columns should look.
* The vector-based user interface powered by Windows Presentation Foundation works and looks even better in high DPI.
One of the more interesting and useful apps in development for Windows Phone 7 is "My MediaCenter Remote" which integrates with the Windows Media Center (an under-rated features of Windows 7). Well, it's useful if you don't want to splurge $10 for a physical remote, ya cheapskate.
The latest version by dgaust is near beta, although like other developers he's anxiously awaiting a physical device to actually run it on. The features so far completed are as follows:
* View and play Recorded TV - done * View and play back tv stored by myTV - done * View music, and create album playlists - done * Remote control media centre - done
What's left is tweaking up some of the graphics, which are a bit dull or just missing at this point (placeholders). Overall though, considering we are still six months from the release of WP7, it's nice to know we should have some advanced media center functionality right out the gate. But we can't help but wish this could actually stream our content instead of just being a remote for it.
At the recent iPhone OS 4.0 launch Steve Jobs gave some figures about the iPad and iPhone sales. So far in total a staggering 85million units with iPhone OS has been sold. Out of those products, the least popular one seems to be the iPad, and that has still sold 450.000 units in about a week since release. Currently, there are 3.500 Apps available for the iPad, and in this first week a staggering 3.500.000 Apps have been sold.
Now no one is saying that Windows Phone 7 is going to be as spectacular success as the iPhone has been. But there will be a large number of units sold. In a few years, smart phones will be as cheap as the regular cell phones, the standard phones to have will be what is now considered smartphones. As we will see prices drop the market will expand in to the developing countries and grab large market shares. And a big share of those new units will host Windows Phone 7 or following OS. With the mobile data traffic predicted to increase multiple times in a matter of years and more accessibility to smartphones, it's a safe bet a lot of that traffic will be App data being sent back and forth.
The Apps market seems like it has exploded, some would even say saturated. But in reality it's just about to explode. App stores in general charging 30% of the price for helping hosting, offering marketing opportunity, distributing and handling money transactions for the actual sales. When thinking about it, that isn't a great deal, it's an astonishing deal. What manufacturer wouldn't want to have that kind of deal? To be able to literally access and sell a product to the entire world, whenever the customer see it fit, and only be charged 30% of the products price is amazing. The future App markets will have turnovers in the billion dollar range. And with Apple and Google acquiring mobile add companies, there are even more ways for App makers to make revenue as analysts says the trend for mobile add revenue is constantly climbing.
If you start learning how to develop Apps for Windows Phone 7 now before it's release, you will have the opportunity to cut a slice of the profit cake.
