Design with Silverlight

I’m sure I’m dating myself a bit here, but back in 1977 or 1978, my parents picked up an early video game console for Christmas. It was a system put out by Telegames and sold through Sears, and it was designed to play a single game - a simple two-player Combat video game. The console had two handles on each side, allowing each player to control a tank on screen:

The goal was to drive around a maze and shoot the other player’s tank.

I decided to create a similar game in Silverlight. It gave me an opportunity to manage multiple moving objects on screen, and some practice with collision detection methods described by Adam Kinney in his Silverlight and Dynamic Animations hands-on lab.

Adam was also kind enough to provide me with a little more detail on the collision detection which I was able to utilize in the game.

You can play my Silverlight version of the game here.

If you’d like to download it and play it on your system offline, a zip archive can be downloaded here.

I’ve spent the last week or so working with Ryan Loghry, a good friend of mine that is an illustrator, putting together a Nintendo “Duck Hunt”-like game in Silverlight (no, I did not include the dog). I’m really pleased with the results, and it was a good opportunity to learn more about how Illustrator/Blend/Visual Studio/Silverlight all work together. Ryan created the illustrations, and then essentially handed me completed XAML files with which to work. Sound effects were pulled from sound effects CDs, and a couple of them were borrowed from Duke Nuke’m. The complete package is about 775K in size.

I may take the opportunity to detail some of the challenges in future blog entries as time permits. This was a really fun project to watch come together.

The game can be seen/played here (make sure your speakers are on!):
http://designwithsilverlight.com/csharp/birdhunt/default.html

Also, if you’re interested in seeing more of Ryan’s excellent illustration work, you can find him here:
http://ryanloghry.com/