After the best part of a year building new features, tweaking, testing, polishing and then polishing a bunch more - Breeze has been released as a full XBox Live title on Windows Phone 7 devices:



Breeze on Windows Phone Marketplace

Breeze, if you didn't get round to trying it on XBLIG, is a family friendly game for all ages and play abilities. The aim of the game is to glide a flower affected by wind, gravity and other fiendish devices, carefully to the goal area. This is done whilst also collecting pick-ups in the form of sunshine orbs. The game has an array of lilting music to keep you entertained as you gently guide the flower to it's destination.

And best of all, Breeze is a free Ad-sponsored game. One of only a few current Live WP7 titles.

If you have a Windows Phone 7 device, go grab it!

Screenshots
Here are some shots of Breeze in action on the phone:




We've got some nice future changes planned too, which will be announced at a later date!

We'll be interested to see how many people pick up the more difficult achievements in the game! It's 37MB, go loot!

As there's a new product on the horizon, I've updated the Null City splash screen graphics:



Prefer this new style, it's less in your face and a little bit more professional looking than the previous splash screen.

Nope, Kitae isn't dead, it's just sleeping (a little).
Some of the stuff added recently includes:

- Undo buffer for the Game Editor.
- New extensions library for WinForms, allows you to easily consume Kitae in WinForms controls.
- New SpriteActor rendering mode which allows for tiled sprite rendering (texturing).
- New SpriteActor edge cropping.
- New simple TileMap culling.
- New examples such as the Windows Forms Test shown in the shot below:

Screenshots:


Things are progressing with Kitae, just at a very slow pace. Hopefully I'll be able to make clear why this is within the next month or so, and hopefully you'll understand.

Right! In my new re-doubled efforts to produce more misc tools and applications - here is the first of hopefully many.

Introducing TrayScript - which pretty much does what it says on the tin. It allows you to create and run scripts (batch files) from the System Tray. TrayScript allows you to categorise and store commonly used scripts all in one place. You could for example use it to build custom backup solutions, or trigger other common tasks that you perform on a frequent basis.

This has been partially written to test a new component that I've built to facilitate other projects, such as Kitae (and hopefully speed up future development of all Null City software) - more on that later this month. The upshot is that TrayScript was written over two evenings after all the frameworks were put in place.

Screenshots


DownloadRequirements: You will need the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 installed to use TrayScript, and Windows XP/Vista/7/Server (any flavour).

	Last Updated: Thursday, 09 June 2011 12:32:51
	MD5: 5AAA77E02E28669DFFAD376BE6143B
	SHA1: 824C5A70A2A283FA319C5E291814AABEAB61D0F5
	Version History (.TXT)  |  Portable Application Description (.PAD)

TrayScript lives here: TrayScript Page

Additionally, I've also added PAD file and Version History file support to downloads on the site. So in future you will be able to see the changes made to all products, including Kitae. If available, these can be accessed at the bottom of the download panel for the file in question, as shown above.

Now that I've written this post, I've just had a new idea for the next release! :) Back to the chopping board... There are blatantly not enough hours in the day.

Right, finally, I've managed to get the time to get most of the site back up and running. The large majority of the links, files and pictures should all be working again. I've still yet to build the new Forums, but that can wait a little while.

There have been some major changes to the site, not least of all the fact that all comments, forum posts and users have been nuked (purposely). The site has now moved to OpenID exclusively for authentication. You can create an account here: Login. Using OpenID means you can sign in with your Google, Yahoo or other account at the click of a button. Hopefully this will be a lot easier for the majority of people who come to the site. For the time being there's not a great deal in the Members section of the site however.

So what's the plan? Well, right now I'm working on getting Kitae finished, released and putting in place all the site infrastructure to allow purchases. Furthermore there has been some restructuring of the Kitae project.

1) We will not be running a beta test program for Kitae for the final crunch to V1, thank you to everyone who helped out testing Kitae. More in the FAQ if you want to have a read.

2) No more schedule, it'll be done when it's done.

3) If you really want to grab hold of a pre-release version, there's a testing program being maintained for a select few. If you want to be part of that program, use the Contact Us form and tell me a bit about yourself, your testing machines, your testing experience and involvement in XNA/the community.

(Any of the previous testers who were vocal/active during the test period who want to drop me a line will be re-added to the beta list.)

I've been a bit quiet around these parts of late.
Fear not, I've not stopped working on Kitae - it's been a long time coming but lots of other projects have gotten in the way, some of which have unavoidably had to take precedence. Most importantly, this site is getting revamped from the ground up, with a new design and back end. Unfortunately this does mean that all forum posts, accounts and, well, basically everything will be nuked come nullpocalypse day. Again, fear not though, everyone who has already signed up for Kitae testing will not be left out of the loop and we still have all the testing request forms. However those who do begin to test Kitae will need to sign up again. The signup process will use OpenID and hopefully will be even easier than it was before.

For the time being, those who were keen to test Kitae, I'm sorry but you will have to wait just a bit longer. I can't release another version of Kitae until the new site is complete, as I'd like people to post about Kitae in the new forums.

When Breeze was released a lot of the reviews for it were incredibly positive, here are a snapshot of some of the reviews:

http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=5546
http://indienerds.com/wordpress/?p=517
http://www.diygamer.com/2010/08/xblig-thursday-drifting-breeze/
http://consolepress.com/main/2010/08/19/xbox-lives-breeze-is-not-a-flower-clone/
http://xboxindies.teamkobun.com/index.php/breeze/
http://xblaratings.com/component/content/article/58-family/2879-breeze

I think I only saw one negative review, whereby it was slated for basically being too hard. <-- by design, but point taken. So I've decided to issue a re-release of Breeze to try encourage more people to give it a whirl without sacrificing the original vision for the game. Breeze was always meant to be a difficult game, sometimes even 'rip your hair out'-difficult. But hopefully for those who enjoy a challenge, Breeze gives you a very quick restart and sets you on your way again to give the difficult levels another blast.

This experience isn't for everyone, and for that reason I've tweaked the difficulty settings a bit and a new V1.1 is now in review. V1.1 has a completely new feature: Air-Brakes. This new addition can be activated with the B button on the Xbox controller and will very quickly bring the flower to a grinding halt. This allows you to whip across levels without the fear of having to stop the flower at the other end. To those already hardened to the Breeze experience this may seem like it will make the game too easy. Firstly, it actually doesn't make the game too easy, it's still a challenge but more of a manageable one. Secondly, if you wish to take on the true challenges of Breeze, there is now a 'Hardcore' mode, which is basically the original game. In this new hardcore mode you have no air-brakes on any levels and you will earn a gold cup next to all levels you complete. The new air-brakes mode is now 'Normal' mode and the easy mode has not changed. Also in 'Normal' mode the flower will not be shredded by the fan if the fan is not spinning, so you get a little added protection.

The new version 1.1 will be released hopefully in a few days, or whenever it passes review.

Oh one more thing, there's a hidden bonus stage in Breeze (there's also a few other easter eggs), has anyone found them? I'm betting not. First person to find them gets their name in 'lights'. Here's a hint: the bonus stage is accessed through a level completed in a certain way, somewhere near the 'middle' of the game.

Ranyl of Good Guy Robots has just released a new game on Xbox Live Indie Game which kept me entertained for hours called Codex. It's an interesting concept whereby you are tasked to shunt tiles in and out of a grid to reproduce the tile order defined for the level. As you move through the levels the puzzles get more mind-bending and the the grid expands to increase the difficulty. The graphics are lovely, the music is fantastic and the puzzles are very cleverly thought out. Check it out!