marc40000

I just found an old screenshot which reminded me of Walkover Fun Edition. If you haven’t seen it yet: it’s walkover with the bugs replaced by all sorts of random characters. The Fun Edition is still there, hidden on the Walkover page – you can try and find it

The update to my first Windows Phone 7 game LavaRun got through the testing phase and got published this night. Due to players feedback, I enhanced the controls and increased the rendering size.

Check it out on WP7AppList or if you have Zune installed in Zune and give it a try on your WP7.

Two days ago got together with a good friend of mine. He just bought a Motorola Milestone 2 and I own a HTC Mozart for not so long as well, so we played around with those devices. He showed me an interesting game called Zombie, Run!. It’s a kind of augmented reality game. The app generates virtual Zombies around you trying to catch you to eat your brains. So obviously, you have to run!

I have played another game like that before called Mister X. The “problem” there was, you need to be at least 3 to 4 people playing together, otherwise it won’t work at all. Since these type of games are rather new, that’s hard to accomplish, especially if you wanted to play spontaneously.

With “Zombie, Run!” it’s different though. While it has a beta multiplayer mode (which didn’t work when we tried – but hey, it’s beta), it perfectly works as well playing alone. So we tried it and had some fun

I checked the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace for similar games but found none. So I decided to implement a clone for wp7. First I’ll start with cloning the basic functionality and then add other things to it. The original Zombie, Run! only consists of running away. I’m thinking of adding weapons you can pick up and shoot nearing zombies. I also might add different types of zombies or other virtual civilians getting turned by zombies. Or you could save them etc. etc.

So here is what I got after about 3 hours:

Right now, the app uses the Bing Map and the GPS Sensor. For the former, you have to get a key at Bing Maps Portal for your application. Afterwards, you can drag&drop the control from the toolbox the form and use it. The GPS Sensor works out of the box easily.

I wanted to try to add a mode for the game where you use the cell phone as a window to the virtual world. That means, if a zombie comes at you from south, you can hold you cell phone camera in that direction and you’ll see the picture of the camera + the zombie properly scaled depending on it’s distance. You can then shoot him with guns if you have any. However, this was idea was put on hold rather fast. While accessing the accelermeter was easy, accessing the camera and the compas was not. Apparently, even though WP7 phones have to have a hardware compass and a camera, there is no api to access them yet, except for some homebrew hacks. I investigated and they are supposed to be available in the next Mango Update. There is an emulator for that released a few days ago, but it’s not fun if I can’t try it in reality. I need to know how precise and fast the compass is for example. I’ll come back to this idea when Mango is released.

Now I’ll go and play Marc’s Zombie Run!