a new deal for WP7

Some months ago here there was a big debate about our #xblig games and the opportunity to port them into WP7; because we develop for living it is important that every minute spent developing have a return. Unfortunally this is hard with WP7 right now if you don't have a Xbox Live Arcade deal (and we haven't) so we migrated to other platforms leaving our #xblig and #wp7 development in a standby phase.
But wait... I have an idea! We still do like porting our XBLIG games to WP7 and the main problem is funding them... so.... here's a deal between you and me:

"if any of our games surpasses the 100000 copies sold (80 mp each) we will port all of our Xbox Live Indie Games to WP7 and give them for free."

In other words we raise fund for our wp7 ports with the xblig marketplace incomes (or with the donate button on this page)

How can you help out? Retweet this post, download our games and tell friends with an Xbox to make the same, share on facebook, spread the voice!

here's a list of our games:

Crystal Crush (shiny and innovative action puzzler)
Bricks4Ever (the best bricks breaking game available on the Xbox, amazing!)
The No Button Game (the first hands free game released before kinect)
Kozu (the dual karma shooter, multiplayer too!)
Avatar Ragdolls (because everyone loves falling hopeless rag-dolls)
Bouncing Avatars (the Xbox answer to iPhone's Doodle Jump but with avatars into, multiplayer too!)

wind of change

In the last two years and an half Running Pixel heavily invested time and resources on the development of Xbox Live indie games (XBLIG) and WP7. In this period we did six Xbox Live Indie Games making this distribution platform our main business and in the last moths we did 3 WP7 apps too. I can't honestly say this was a complete failure but I can't either say it was a success.
XBLIG is a strange world with its own market rules where sometime strange things happens and where good games fail and crappy one make good sales. (When I speak about good games I don't necessarily speak about my own games fyr.)
In this two years I saw heavy bugs affecting sales (the frozen top downloads list for example), a growing lack of interest of MS about their creature (XBLIG), internal fight to reach with unfair methods the top rated list, a very slow growing of the overall sales and some other disturbing things that made me loose my faith in XBLIG and in MS in general.
I think that 30 months are enough to judge a platform and my opinion is that it is a partial fail. I don't say there arent't good developers or good games because they are, but as someone else said xblig looks like a pit, once you're there you can't exit anymore, it is not a launch platform like someone (and me) could expect.

Now let's talk about WP7... well it's a great phone and I was one of the first Xblig developer making a conversion of one of its games for that phone (maybe the first) but in full honesty there are two major obstacles: the first is that there are still too few phones around and it is growing very slow (expecially compared with android or iOS) the second one is that the Xbox Live games are heavily promoted on the WP7, this put your not XBL game in an awkward position, and I have seen what this means with the XBLIG.
Six month ago in my mind the correct path would have been this -> first XBLIG and then WP7, but now I don't see this viable.

That said, I still love XNA and XBLIG but if me and my team still want to make games and live with them it's time to change platform and go for the huge markets and the freedom behind PC/Mac and Android or iOS phones and tablets. This means no more XNA coding and so it will be difficult to release WP7 and or XBLIG games because they would be threated as ports.
I'm excited about this fresh start and I can anticipate you the we're rapidly porting some unfinished but intriguing XNA projects into the new platforms to be released in a month or less. Stay tuned!

updates... updates... updates

This was an interesting week here around. "Step Counter" for WP7 was updated and bricks4ever for xbox360 too... the first is one of RP latest app and the second is one of RP best sellers, it is 18 months old but still rocks.

There are interesting news and evolution on the SheepNobi's side too, there will be a related post very very soon.

another WindowsPhone7 app - My Level

Can you survive without a level? I can't so I did MY LEVEL for WP7. It has a usefull and simple calibration tool. You don't need a perfect leveled surface to caliber it, just a plane enough one, it will do the rest.

here the link to the app: My Level

First RunningPixel's WindowsPhone7 app

First app is published!
It isn't The No Button Game that had some little problems with the certification process (nothing major, it is in process again), it is a whole new thing I hope you will find useful.

I'm proud to announce you that STEP COUNTER is born!
It is the first step counter for WP7, usefull when jogging or during a walk. It counts every step you make and reports you the overrall number of steps, and the average. It makes use of the accelerometer to detect the steps.

Here is some screenshots and the icons.

if you own an WP7 here's the link to download it (via Zune):
http://redirect.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=044c4f3b-51d6-df11-a844-00237de2db9e&source=MSDN

First WindowsPhone7 edition images

First pictures of the The No Button Game WP7 edition running on an WP7 LG phone.

The game works in three modes:

Touch Mode: jumo and run by touching the phone screen
Tap Mode: play with the phone on a table and tapping near the phone.
Shake Mode: shake the phone to jump and run (new!!!)