Silverlight game continued...

Well the game has been making progress, if a little slow. The developer I'm working with has dabbled with a little games programming in the past but has been learning Silverlight games programming techniques as we've gone along. So between the two of us, its pretty much been a case of getting stuck in.

Once I'd drawn the characters in Expression Design, I exported them as xaml files, added them to a Blend project and worked on the (very basic!) animations for each character. For some characters I created just the one storyboard, other characters have several so that they can work independently and randomly. The developer requested I make each character a User Control. Getting this just right for him to work on took a bit of re-jigging: ensuring that the character was positioned within a canvas rather than the default grid, plus resizing the canvas tight to the character's edges. Some animations worked well when added to the game, others required some tweaking. Initially I'd worked with two 'states' which consisted of the basic character which was swapped to another image of the character in its altered state. This didn't seem the right approach and indeed didn't really work well in situ so I found working on the change of features directly in Blend in the storyboard far more satisfactory. Having used Expression Design really was an advantage when working with Blend, as methods of editing vector images are shared between the two.

The most exciting thing was seeing the characters and animations in a game that works! The game is playable at the moment but not finished - still some more to work on but its oh so close!