Smarty Pants Coding - Coding with a touch of flava

It has been a very long month of working hard to knock out two launch titles for Windows Phone 7 - Hungry Castaway and Matchingo. I have just put up a new site specifically for these games (and more games) that will be published under the name Smarty Pants Gaming.

visit SmartyPantsGaming.com

I hope you will check out the site and check it out often. We just posted the first real video of Matchingo for WP7 which you can find on the site, or here below:

Be sure to bookmark SmartyPantsGaming.com now - or find it on the sidebar to the left.

In my last blog post on XNA for Windows Phone 7 I said that I was working on a game in both Silverlight and XNA, and that if I got a chance to test out performance I would report back. As you can see in the image below, I got a chance to test out my Silverlight game on a real device last week at ReMIX Atlanta - so this post is to cover some insights gained.

me testing my game prototype on a Windows Phone 7 device

First off, if you are trying to get a basic understanding of when to choose between XNA and Silverlight for WP7, you should take a look at this post by Michael Klucher. Michael lays down the basic differences between the two platforms - Silverlight has great controls with great tool support for styling them, and XNA has a crazy fast sprite rendering pipeline which supports full 3D.

But, let's say that you don't need controls for your game, and you don't need 3D - is Silverlight good enough for writing a basic 2D game? After playing with a device briefly last weekend I can tell you the performance of Silverlight on the device looked great - but you will need to analyze the game you're creating a bit before making the ultimate decision.

(click 'read more' to keep reading..)