Zombie Outhouse Development Part 7

Zombie Outhouse Development Part 7: Back to the XNA Arrrr!

[Bonus points to whoever gets the title reference.  Okay, maybe not.]

Porting Zombie Outhouse to Windows Phone 7 was a fairly easy process since the game was developed using XNA and already running on the Xbox 360 & Zune HD.  But Windows Phone 7 is a new mobile platform with its own set of challenges.

The assets were the same high res assets as used on the Xbox 360 and adjusting coordinate values for the 800×480 screen was a simple but mindless process.  The Trial Mode from the Xbox 360 was added back in and the checkpoint saving/loading code was ported to XNA from the iOS version.  The code base was also updated to XNA4, with file i/o being the biggest to change.

Developing for the WP7 was very easy since the tools were great and Microsoft had great support in place with various webcasts, forums, etc that helped made the transition smooth.  I was also fortunate enough to get a WP7 developer phone to do final testing on and fix some issues that did not show up in the emulator.

I wanted to add some kind of Twitter/Facebook posting from within the game, but that isn’t possible since you can’t mix certain elements of Silverlight with XNA.  Hopefully XNA5/Silverlight5 will be able to coexist 100% in the future.  We can only dream.

I took everything I learned with the Zombie Outhouse porting and applied it to my next game, Monstercraft, which is currently available for iOS and WP7!

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