The guys over at SilverArcade have launched their portal dedicated to games made in Silverlight.  They are offering a $.50 eCPM, which is quite good.

Since they have acceptsed a couple of our games, and since I think it is a cool idea, I'd like to see them build some traffic over there.  Here they are:

Katies Heart Catcher :

Zamboozal Poker Dice:

These are certainly not our best games, but they are a starting point for the future of our Silverlight development.

• Mono (Open Source .NET)
• Eclipse For Mac OSX

orry it has been a while since I've posted any news about Silverlight. We've been busy finishing off our Flash games from the 4K Contest, and working on our new Video Podcast.

First, the really big news is that Microsoft has released the Silverlight 3 Beta to the public. There are some very exciting new features in Silverlight 3 that will be of specific interest to game developers. Here is list of the things I think will change Silverlight Game Development forever (one Silverlight 3 is released):

orry, I missed a week of this mash-up, but I'm back again with another entry chock-full of Silverlight Game Development Goodness.

This week we check out new entries in the Silverlight Game Development Blogosphere.

The guys over at Silverlight Games 101 have just launched a new Silverlight Game portal, SilverArcade.com. They are currently accepting game submissions and ideas for a their new logo for the site. This is great news for Silverlight Game Developers. Another great idea they have is "quality control". They will not be accepting every game that come across their inbox. This is great news for devs who are tired of competing with the latest pile of "Developed-in-2-hours-from-stolen-code super-click" games for attention from portal players...

n the past couple years I have done my share of AS3 work, but since I have so many unfinished game engines in AS2, I have maintained a good amount of work in that version of ActionScript because I already had a ton of work complete. However, my last Zamboozal project have changed my attitude.

For the recently finished Zamboozal Silverlight/Flash project, I decided to write the game in Silverlight/C# and then convert it back to ActionScript 2 in Flash. I thought this would take no longer than a few hours. At first, I was right. Because I had planned out my Silverlight object model to closely match how AS2 works, it was fairly easy to covert the C# code to AS2 and get a set of code that would compile. About 4 hours into the conversion process that was complete, and I was a happy boy.

ilverlight Interweb Mash-Up Feb.9, 2009

Last week I had several people email me and ask to get their sites added to the weekly round-up. I say "GLADLY I Will add them! " The only way to get a bead on the Silverlight Game Development Community is to know that it exists out there. If I have missed anything (which I often do), feel free to tell me about it in the comments or via email in the contact section.

t is still very quiet on the Silverlight game development front this week. However, we will forge through as we believe this platform is going to be very significant very soon.

Microsoft has not added any more games to their Silverlight.net Showcase this week, but the silverlight.net community gallery has added a couple small ones:

Excuse me for being a bit nostalgic, but tomorrow is my birthday. Actually, since my brother Jeff and I are twins, it is both our birthday's. Anyhow, nearly 20 years ago Jeff and I created our first real "finished" and compiled object code game (we had made many games in various BASIC languages for many years prior) named Zamboozal Poker Dice.

his might seem like a very simple topic, but it is something that confounded me for a few hours while translating a Flash AS2 game to Silverlight 2: Random Numbers. For many games, the concept of random numbers is essential. Nearly all programming languages have a function to create a random number, and most of them actually create "pseudo" random numbers (a list that could be replicated given the proper time and effort), but most of the time that is good enough. We will be concentrating on these "pseudo" random numbers for this discussion.

Generating numbers that appear to be random in Flash is quite easy. In AS2, to create a random number from 1-6 you would do something like this:

ilverlight Game Development Interweb Mash-Up, Jan. 11 2009

Now that we are expanding 8bitrocket.com to more indie game dev technologies, we will also expand our world famous "interweb mash-ups" to those technologies. Don't worry Flash fans though, Jeff's regular Flash interweb mash-up will remain unchanged, we are simply adding a new one to cover our new Silverlight friends.

We start with the king daddy of them, Bill Reiss. His blog Silverlight Games 101 is the current best source for developing games in Silverlight.

lash To Silverlight : Guess The Number Game: Part 2 - Silverlight

For my first foray into Flash->Silverlight Game development, I will create a very simple "Guess The Number" game in Flash and then discuss how to do nearly the exact same thing with Silverlight. 

In Part 2 we cover the Silverlight version of the game.

(Read Part 1)

lash -> Silverlight 2 Game Development #2: Guess The Number Game Part 1 : Flash

For my first foray into Flash->Silverlight Game development, I will create a very simple "Guess The Number" game in Flash and then discuss how to do nearly the exact same thing with Silverlight.  In Part 1 we cover the FLASH version of the game.

icrosoft recently announced the beta of Silverlight, their obvious stab at taking market-share from the Adobe Flash Platform. As a die hard Flash developer, I was very interested to see just what Silverlight could do, so I decided to download the beta and try out some of their examples on their Gallery page. Below is a brief run-down of my thoughts on each one.