Why Apple’s approval process hurts users, developers, and ultimately, Apple

Everyone knows by now that iPhone developers must submit their apps to Apple for approval before they make it to the app store.  And by now, almost everyone knows how irritating the whole process has been for developers.  Personally, I don’t have a huge problem with it.  Approvals take about a week, and Apple has the right to make sure that the apps appearing in the store meet their standards.  But there is one part of the process that irritates me to no end, and is ultimately hurting everyone: app update approvals. Read more

An Introduction to HLSL (Part II)

Continuing on in our exploration of HLSL, let’s look at building a simple shader that applies a texture to a model using UV coordinates. Read more

An Introduction to HLSL (Part I)

In a previous article we looked at how to use custom shaders when rendering models, or as post-processing effects when applied to an entire scene. Now let’s look at how to build our own shaders. Read more

XNA Tetris in 24 Hours

The “Tetris in 24 Hours” challenge is over, and the total dev time clocked in at just over 15 hours. This was about more than just coding up Tetris for the 360. It was also about figuring out some aspects of XNA I was unfamiliar with, as well as parsing someone else’s code (namely, the GameStateManagement example from creators.xna.com). Read more

Horror Rendering in XNA

Soon we’ll be looking in more depth at post-processing in XNA, particularly how its done and what you can do with it. In the meantime, I thought I’d show an extremely simple example of using post-processing to get a very specific genre look. Read more

Game State Management

One of the earliest things you need to think about when developing your game is game state management.

Microsoft has graciously included a terrific game state management example, so let’s take a look at it in more depth. Read more