INTERVIEWING DEAN DODRILL, CREATOR OF “DUST: AN ELYSIAN TAIL”

What’s the dream of game developers like myself? To get an opportunity, even the slightest one, to publish your own game title on the big leagues. That game that you always dream of creating from scratch. Your masterpiece. Your 9th Symphony …

Some of us, generally “indies”, even dear dream of watching that game become a success once it goes gold. The kind of success that allows us to officially become part of the Industry from that moment and on with a critical mass of loyal gamers waiting for our next tiles with sincere smiles of joy on their faces.

For Dean Dodrill, creator of the acclaimed game entitled “Dust: An Elysian Tail”, the dream has become a reality.

For those of you who still don’t know, Dean’s game (Dust: AET) was the grand-prize winner of the Dream.Build.Play contest held back in 2009. Recently, the game went gold on the Live Arcade marketplace  for the XBox 360 console (“XBLA”), as a part of the Summer of Arcade 2012 promotion (“SoA”).

As soon as the game got released, it received (and still does) lots of positive reviews, articles, kind words from buyers, a zizillion of tweets and FB posts, and ratings varying from 8.5 to a perfect-10 score.

Most of them, like this interview with the guys of IGN’s  Podcast Unlocked (which I recommend listening to), focus on the story behind the creation of the game and the game itself, from the perspective of gamers.

So, since the game was fully developed with C# and XNA, being a strong supporter of both technologies for years, I decided to try luck and interview him from the perspective of an indie XNA'er.

Well, … guess what? Dean kindly answered all of my questions, so be prepared to read his responses after watching the launch trailer of his game.

Ok, we’re back. Before posting the interview I want to thank Dean publicly for accepting the interview and taking the time to answer all the questions.

Now, enjoy the reading …

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Q: Are sells going as you expected? I mean, I don’t want to know the figures; instead, I want to know whether they have reached a point where you can continue developing games professionally (you know, to continue living the dream) or not (= it contributes to make you family’s life better for a while but it is not enough to go beyond).

A: It’s a little early to determine how well sales are going, but I do believe the game will allow me to continue game development, at least at the scale I’m currently working on.

Q: How was it like using the XNA framework –from and artist viewpoint, given your lack of programming experience? (I mean, pros and cons) Which features do you love for C#/XNA to have built-in (I mean, that lacking feature that forced you use a workaround or take a programming detour)?

A: Since I’ve never programmed with anything other than C#/XNA I can’t really compare it to other languages. I will say that I found it fairly easy to pick up, and since much of my code resulted in some sort of visual feedback in the game, iteration was fun. Garbage collection on the 360 was always a hassle, but I loved many XNA specific niceties, such as SpriteBatch and streamlined gamepad support. I also love XACT and how relatively easy it was to work with audio and effects. If I could help I would continue working with XNA exclusively.

Q: Which features of the extended XNA APIs for Live Arcade did you use? Again, how was it like using them?

A: I did have to use the XNA extensions for XBLA, and admittedly most of that was a hassle. The biggest issue is that most of it is poorly documented, and there were always certification issues which were inherent of XNA. Integrating Leaderboards and Achievements was one of my least favorite parts of the process. I definitely got the feeling that XNA wasn’t created with XBLA in mind.

Q: Given that you got a contract with MSFT, do you still own the IP rights of Dust: AET? Did you receive financial advantages, like not having to pay for (re)certification) and or dev/test kits? (if you can comment on it, of course)

A: I do own the IP to Dust:AET, but of course have signed an exclusivity period with MS. MS helped with testing and localization, and assigned me an excellent producer who helped push the game through the system (as well as offered valuable design suggestions). It’s a mutually beneficial agreement, otherwise I can’t go too much into details.

Q: Are you planning additions/extensions to the game? Say, now that you met the deadline for Summer of Arcade, you want to add that feature that stayed behind and would have loved to develop for the release by “unlocking some extra time”?

A: I haven’t given much thought to anything like DLC. Thankfully I didn’t have to cut anything to meet the SoA deadline, it was just a matter of compressing the schedule down and working VERY hard for a few months. Given more time I would have liked to polish a bit more, but that’s the curse of any project I’m sure. I do have plans for future games in this universe, but nothing to announce at this time.

Q: Are you planning to port the game to other MSFT platforms like WinPhone8, Win8 and the Surface? (for instance, by using Monogame or ANX).

A: MS and I haven’t discussed anything outside of XBLA at this time. I was honestly so busy focusing on the XBLA release that I hadn’t considered a port. If anything pops up I’ll be sure to announce it, but XBLA remains my focus as of this writing.

Q: Thanks in advance for reading, your response and for such a great XNA game which serves as a great inspiration for us, indies.

A: Thanks for the interview, Pete.

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Game Description:

Immerse yourself in a gorgeous hand-painted world on a search for your true identity. As the mysterious warrior, Dust, your action-packed journey will take you from peaceful glades to snowy mountaintops and beyond. At your disposal is the mythical Blade of Ahrah, capable of turning its wielder it into an unstoppable force of nature, and the blade's diminutive guardian, Fidget.

Battle dozens of enemies at once with an easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master combat system, take on a variety of quests from friendly villagers, discover ancient secrets and powerful upgrades hidden throughout the massive, open world, and uncover the story of an ancient civilization on the brink of extinction as you fight to uncover your own past.

• Take control of Dust, a warrior searching for his true purpose, as he joins forces with the mystical Blade of Ahrah and its guardian, Fidget, to save the world of Falana from an army unlike any before it!
• Explore an incredible hand-painted world!
• Match wits and weapons against challenging monsters!
• Take on side-quests from a cast of colorful, fully-voiced characters!
• Craft dozens of items and discover Falana's rarest treasures!
• Compete against your friends' high scores in ranked Challenge Arenas!

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Nice interview, don’t you think?

Not only is the game fantastic but also it may help developers finally understand how powerful C# could be when coupled with a fine tech like XNA, despite unavoidable performance differences with native bits, when you use the tech right even as a one man band (like in Dean’s case).

It’s a pity that many devs (pro and indie) still deem XNA as a tool for kids and hobbyist, only, and don’t give it an opportunity. And what is worse, it’s a shame that MSFT –at least for what is publicly known so far- won’t update it any longer …

To wrap it up, Dust: AET shows off a quite enjoyable gameplay, incredible art as well as the mechanics behind its 2D environment, like skeletal animations, particle systems, input combos, shaders, to mention just a few.

So, what are you waiting for? Go and buy it now!

Cheers!
~Pete

RUN WEB CAMP URUGUAY

Last month Montevideo held a new edition of Microsoft’s one-day-all-day event in Uruguay, named “Run Web Camp Uruguay”.

During the event there were many sessions of talks divided as usual in two main categories: For IT Pros and For Developers.

From dev topics like WP7, Silverlight, HTML5, and ASP.NET MVC to IT ones like System Center Configuration Manager 2012 and Virtual Machine Manager 2012, the event covered tech that is available today and what we can expect in the near future.

At the end of the day, there were some round tables named “Ask to Experts” where you could go, grab a beer, and chat with experts in each field.

This year MSFT invited me to be part of the round table about WP7 as the expert in XNA along with an expert in Silverlight. I must say it was a really cool experience!

Kinect was also present. During the breaks, attendees could and did play with it. It was fun to see the ones that had their first contact with the device as they attempted to do some weird movements to control stuff. Of course the learning curve is low so they got accustomed in a heart bit.

To wrap it up, Run Web Camp Uruguay was really enjoyable and quite a success.

For more info and to watch videos of some talks, please go to this page:

http://www.puertadeenlace.net/post/Lo-que-nos-dejo-el-RUN-Uruguay.aspx

‘till next time,
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

GETTING A REFERENCE TO A METHOD-CALLING OBJECT IN C#

Ok, after taking a month off from any blogging activity, I guess is time to catch up and blog again. And I believe there is no better way of doing so than to write an article explaining a way to get a reference to the object that calls a specific method.

For the last two years or so, I have been working hard on a new Content Manager replacement API for the XNA Framework to use on my own “never-ending” game engine (I will blog about this later on). In some early stages of development I found a way to solve this referencing burden that have been creating headaches to many devs, globally (being me, one of them, for a long time).

Although I must admit that at some point on the development cycle of my API I decided to abandon this workaround, after reading one of the articles mentioned by Shawn here (guess which one), I believe it’s a great opportunity to talk about it.

A little history … before founding this solution I tried everything: from attempting to use –with no luck- the info held in StackFrame instances and even delegates to finally “quit” and use a naive approach as passing the caller as a parameter in the signature of an operation. But, then came .NET Framework 3 and extension methods to the rescue!

Please bear with me that the example presented in this article is just a simple one to show how to use it, but believe my words when I say that it can be extended to complex scenarios.

Having said that … if you want to know which object is calling a certain method of a class like (which may or may not be sealed):

  public sealed class MyCalledClass
  {
    internal bool JustReturnTrue(int myParameter)
    {
      return true;
    }
  }

Being the caller, say, a specification of the following class:

  public abstract class MyCallingClass
  {
    public void Print()
    {
      Console.WriteLine("I am the object which is just about to call
         the monitored operation named 'JustReturnTrue' …");
    }
  }

Then all you have to do is to implement the following generic extension method for the types you want (in my example, “MyCallingClass”):

  public static class MyExtensionMethod
  {
    public static bool ExecuteOperation<T>
      (this T mycallingClass, int myParameter)
      where T: MyCallingClass
    {
      mycallingClass.Print(); // Replace it with your own stuff.
 
      return new MyCalledClass().JustReturnTrue(myParameter);
    }
  }

The trick here is to design and split assemblies and namespaces in a way that all instances of “MyCallingClass” cannot directly execute the “JustReturnTrue” operation (I leave that task as an exercise to the reader).

But there is one catch to watch closely, though. By doing this you are actually adding one more call (you know that), which is not generally a problem on Windows, but for the XBox 360 and all devices using the Compact Framework, it could turn out to be expensive if used lots of times on intensive or heavy tasks/loops.

But if you really need it when speed is not an issue or for operations where -for example- you need to set owners to something “automagically” behind the scenes and later assess whether an owner calls a restricted operation before executing it, then there you have it!

Just use it wisely …
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

SILVERLIGHT 3 BETA 1 IS OUT (?)

There's no official word out yet but, according to the links posted on the site Next Best Geek, the first beta version of the upcoming Silverlight 3 (Runtime, SDK and Tools) has been released by MSFT.

I have yet no idea what new features are available in this beta but I cannot wait to see what's in it.

Downloading ...

~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.