Nazeeh's Little Corner on the Web

Yep! Yet another team interview is done! Today I bring you Eli Tayrien, the dude that drove me NUTS with his choice of music (we shared an office for a while). I guess I drove him nuts with mine too… he’s not into Metal (pfft). Eli is a super fun person to work with and I am very happy you guys will get to know him a little more. On with the interview! Read more...

In my last post in this series, I talked about the GameStateManagement sample. I got a few comments asking that I upgrade it to include the newly threaded Loading.cs that was introduced in the Networking version of the same sample. So, I did that and bundled the whole thing in a template so you can always have it to start new projects with. Read more...

Hey everyone! Just a super quick post that I have added a list of links to all the XNA GS team member blogs I could find. You can find the list on my front page on the right side column towards the bottom. I will be updating it with any other blogs I know of. Read more...

Today we will talk about the next step in my project “Odyssey” game series. We have already talked about why we need to design a game, and then I attempted to design my own game which I call “Odyssey”. Now that we know what we’re trying to build, it’s time to prepare our “workbench” with the tools we need! One of the coolest samples we have released is the Game State Management sample. This sample gives you a working template you can use to create game menus, options, pop up messages, etc. I will be using this sample in project “Odyssey” to handle all the menus and game options. Trust me, this is saving me a whole lot of time! Let’s see how this sample works. Read more...

For today’s team member interview, I am very happy to give you guys Stephen Styrchak! When it comes to Visual Studio, no one on the team knows half as much as Stephen does. I mean, this dude REALLY knows Visual Studio inside out. I asked Stephen if he would agree to being interviewed for my series, he very kindly agreed and got back to me with the answers pretty quickly. I hope you all enjoy reading the interview as much as I did! Without futher ado: I give you Stephen Styrchak! Read more...

So this is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while and just got around to getting it done now. XNA Game Studio has been brought to you guys by one of the hardest working and most dedicated teams I have ever had the honor of being a part of. You already know some of the team members through the forums and such, but it’s time you really get to know them! With that said, I want to kick off the “Team Interviews” series! I ask questions, a team member answers them, and I publish the interview here for you to read. I am delighted to start this series with one of our framework developers: Yuichi Ito Read more...

As promised in my previous post, today I’ll try to take a stab at designing my own game. I told you  how important the game design process is and how you should know all that there is to know about your game before writing any code. Well, turns out that it’s not a very easy thing to do! I spent a few days brainstorming in my head and trying to come up with what I wanted to do. Finally, I got a good grasp on the major game mechanics I wanted to do and started to dig deeper and find more ideas. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. Read more...

This is the first post in my “Building a game” series! The aim of this series is to walk through building a game from scratch and try to include as much of the thought process involved as possible. So how about you grab yourself something to drink and let’s sit and chat about game design! Read more...

Some of you may be asking… where did I go? Why no new posts? Or…maybe you’re not asking that, but I’ll go with my first thought! I am still here totally alive and kicking. Got back to work from the holidays and been kind of busy ever since. That doesn’t mean that I forgot about my blog though. Now that we’ve been through enough basics to qualify us to write a game, I’ve been thinking of one to blog about. Here’s what I am thinking about… Read more...

This is a quick post for something that I just had to share with everyone. I can’t believe I haven’t come across this BRILLIANT utility until now! Trust me, I look for stuff like that all the time yet still managed to miss it. Allow me to introduce to you: WinTabber! So…what is this thing? Read more...