This past weekend I've been working on optimizing my game Positron for release on Windows Phone 7. I found a few major flaws in the rendering which I fixed and meant that performance increased drastically, so much so that I can now render the game at full 800x480 resolution (was previously rendering to a reduced resolution of 500x300).

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I've not posted much lately as I've been busy finishing my game Positron but I've been seeing increasingly negative comments targetted at Microsoft with regards to Windows 8, XNA, and XBLIG lately and I thought I'd post something to share my thoughts.

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A few days ago I spoke at a Game Republic event promoting Windows Phone 7 with Mike Ormond, Will Leach and Simon Jackon. The various presentations covered the Windows Phone 7 platform, Xbox Live integration for licensed developers and then Simon and I showed off Vequencer and spoke briefly about how we'd developed it.

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Being an advocate of the Xbox Live Indie Games channel I have always tried to stay on top of the games being released and follow many of the developers on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

The thing is, there are many more XBLIG developers who I'm not following, and many games which get very little exposure on the internet and they don't get the coverage from the gaming media either.

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Many months ago, way back in May I first heard about the PlayStation Suite, a new initiative from Sony to open up development on their platforms to a wider audience in a similar way to what Microsoft have done with XNA.

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On Saturday I took part in the launch event for Nokia's alphalabs experiment. It was a great event and I really enjoyed the entire day, but before I go into more detail let me give you some background information.

About a month ago I was contacted by a member of Nokia's developer outreach program (Robin Cramp) with regards to working on a project for Nokia's new Windows Phone, the Lumia 800. It sounded like something I'd like to be involved in so I put my name in.

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I was pleased to see an article about Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) on gamesindustry.biz this week, but after reading it I think the writer still did not really explain what the article title hinted at. The article in question subtitled 'How To Survive' does not really give much insight into how the platform and the marketplace works for the average developer. It showcases some of the work done by some of the more experienced developers and sweeps away the thousands of failed ventures that have gone before them.

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Last Wednesday I finally managed to get down to Coventry to attend my first ever XNA UK UserGroup meeting and had a great time.

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I've just submitted this issue on Connect (Microsoft's 'Bug tracker'), if you're an XNA developer interested in developing for XBLIG please read and 'vote-up' my issue (note you'll need to log in to a Live! account first):

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I've been using a third party physics library in my XNA projects since mid 2010 called BEPUphysics . When I started using BEPUphysics it was distributed under a commercial license which meant you had to pay a percentage of your game's revenue to the creators of BEPUphysics.

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I began writing my own deferred renderer in XNA about two years ago. There were a few excellent resources on ZiggyWare, Catalin Zima's site and Riemer Grootjan's site regarding deferred rendering. They helped me quickly get a working renderer written but I still didn't understand much of the maths and concepts behind it.. I just thought it looked cool.

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I originally set up this site with the intention of posting some XNA tutorials and information to help out other developers but unfortunately due to deadlines and working on my own XNA games I've had very little time to get anything written.

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Since I first started using XNA (back around the time when XNA 3.0 was just released) I'd been wanting some way to load content without it stalling the main thread.

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Coming from an old-school C background I have to admit that I write my code in a very non-OO way and there are certain aspects of C# especially that I hadn't really got into using. One such aspect was C# Properties.

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The past few days I've been working through some of my engine and game code replacing my usual comments with documentation comments and I thought I'd make a quick post about it since it seems to be something very few people do.

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I've been thinking for a while that I need to go back to my XNA BSP Processor / Importer to optimize the output a little more and my current focus is optimizing the patch meshes in the BSP. We use NetRadiant to create our game levels in BSP format (and for our track builder I export each piece as an individual BSP then convert it into a mesh since I'm not really a modeller but I'm pretty good with level editing tools).

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Here's a preview of my latest XNA project, a new track builder game for Xbox Live Indie Games. The screenshot here shows a view of the track in free-view mode after creating the track in-game. The aim of the game is to create your own tracks, set fastest lap times and share them with other people on Xbox Live!

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I've spent the last few days reworking some of the core shaders in my XNA games and in particular working on the shaders that render the cars in our racing game Shadow Racers.

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For those of you out there who are Twitter users I have three accounts on there which I try to regularly keep updated (ok, not so much yet but I do plan to update them more often).

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For those of you who don't know, I've long been interested in game development and it is my intent to become a professional games developer in the near future.

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