Posts Tagged with zero gravity
February 4, 2008 at 10:21 am · Filed under Games
Last year Terralever took on the challenge of creating a game with Silverlight. In doing so, our overall goal was to release something compelling that coincided with Silverlight’s public coming-out party; establishing that casual gaming was a viable usage of the Silverlight platform. That game was called Zero Gravity, and it received a warm welcome from both casual gamers and the development community.
A few months ago Terralever was again approached with a Silverlight game design and developement challenge: Create a casual/twitch game for Miniclip.com utilizing Silverlight 1.0. To be clear, Silverlight has evolved. The Silverlight team has released a more advanced Silverlight plug-in which allows far more flexibility in development. That said, Miniclip wasn’t looking to leverage that version of the plug-in. The game would need to be built with for the 1.0 plug-in.
Leveraging lessons learned from Zero Gravity, a team of Terralever designers, developers, and multimedia artists produced Zombomatic 3000, an addicting puzzle game. The game was created under an incredible time constraint, but the team wasn’t willing to push the game out until they were fully satisfied with the overall user experience.
I did not have much involvement in this project, and have to say I was surprised (in a good way) at the resulting game. The extra effort the entire team put into “getting it right” shows. Zombomatic serves as a confident marker in the casual gaming space as the first Silverlight game to appear on Miniclip.com, one of the world’s largest causal gaming web sites.
Congratulations to The Terralever Zombomatic 3000 team (alphabetical order):
Tags: Casual Gaming, Games, Microsoft, miniclip.com, Silverlight, Terralever, zero gravity, ZombomaticShare This
July 4, 2007 at 3:41 am · Filed under Games
Casey Rayl and I had the opportunity to make a quick run up to Redmond, Washington to visit Microsoft’s HQ. The opportunity was made available to us due to the cool work that a team at Terralever did building a game called Zero Gravity with Alpha Microsoft technology.
We met up with Laura Foy (Microsoft’s On10.net—but you may remember her from G4 TV) and Charles Torres (Microsoft’s Channel 9).
Everyone at Microsoft was great, and we had a really good time on our quick trip. The perfect weather didn’t hurt either (we came from Phoenix where it was North of 110 during our stint). We met up with Charles at the building that I worked at during my short time at Microsoft. I also was lucky enough to bump into a few friendly (and incredibly bright) Microsoft office mates including David Shadle, Hans Hugli, and Ernie Booth.
What’s to come of the visit? If everything pans out, a few minutes of geek fame on one, or both, of the Microsoft community sites.
UPDATE: On10 has posted the Laura Foy Silverlight game interview.
Until then, here’s a nice shot of Casey in front of a giant Silverlight banner on Campus, and an obligatory shot of the Space Needle.
Tags: Channel 9, Games, Laura Foy, lt. bennett, Microsoft, On10, Silverlight, Terralever, Windows, zero gravityShare This
June 27, 2007 at 8:55 am · Filed under Alpha, Visual Design, Games
Our little experimental Silverlight Alpha (1.1) game is being featured on Microsoft’s Silverlight.net web site! Gameplays are rolling in and the team is already getting fun (and constructive) feedback on the game.
It seems as though Level 20 is the one that everyone gets stumped on. Only a select handful have made it past it! Give it a shot!
UPDATE: Well, after 6 days and a lot of attention, and a lot of gameplay, 88 dedicated players have completed Zero Gravity (made it all the way to the last level)! It’s a testament to the toughness of the puzzle game as thousands of people have taken on the challenge!
Tags: Alpha, Games, lt. bennett, Microsoft, Silverlight, Terralever, Visual Design, zero gravityShare This
June 27, 2007 at 7:57 am · Filed under Alpha, Programming, Beta, Social Networking, Games, Visual Design, User Experience
To put the Microsoft Silverlight Alpha 1.1 plug-in through its paces, a team here at Terralever has worked up a game called Zero Gravity. You can learn a little about the game here:
Zero Gravity
The Terralever Sandbox
I’m leaning towards getting some sleep, and noticed Tim Heuer put together a great post about the Silverlight Game, so I’m going to point you in that direction to hear about our project from his perspective.
Enjoy the game! If you’re a developer, look forward to our team providing code snippets at our sandbox page. Questions? Get to know Lt. Bennett on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. Oh, and if you like the game, give us a Digg!
UDPATE: Here’s a picture of local (Regional… National… International…) Microsoft hero Tim Heuer demoing Zero Gravity at The Arizona .NET User Group Über Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona on the 27th of June. Sorry for the poor quality photo…
Tags: Alpha, Beta, Games, lt. bennett, Programming, Silverlight, Social Networking, Terralever, User Experience, Visual Design, zero gravityShare This
