UK Gaming Past, Present and Future

Written by Adrian Killens on .

 

The Centre for Computing History is going to be hosting a weekend celebrating the past, present and future of UK gaming at the end of May. Paying homage to everything from Jet Set Willy to Grand Theft Auto and everything between. Even Mr Panda will be making an appearance.

The event is kicking off on Friday 23rd May with one of the increasingly popular Retro Video Game Nights, where you'll be able to play some UK classics, followed by two days of talks and interactive exhibitions. So make sure you get yourself down there!

Full Details and tickets can be found here:

Retro Gaming Night (23rd May 2014)

UK Gaming Past, Present & Future (24th & 25th May 2014)

 

Lunar Panda Deluxe Out Now!

Written by Adrian Killens on .

Lunar Panda Deluxe

Today was a rather exciting one here at Gimpy Software! After nearly a year of development and a month or so of submitting, tweaking and re-submitting Lunar Panda Deluxe we're finally on the Xbox Store. In fact if you turn on your Xbox 360 right this minute and browse to the 'Indie' section then you should see Mr Panda's smiling face on the first screen, hopefully he'll stay there for a little while but if you don't see him the a cheeky search should do the trick.

We got the email last night at around 3am to say that the game had finally been approved and then around 8am Dean "Carmack" Edis made the first ever purchase of Lunar Panda Deluxe.

You can try it for free and if you enjoy it then full version can be yours for a mere $1.

The PC version will be coming shortly!

Retro Gaming Expos for 2014

Written by Adrian Killens on .

If you went any Retro Gaming expos last year then there's a good chance that you played Dean's Lunar Panda arcade machine! Well it's now 2014 and the list of expos seems be getting longer by the month, which is great news for people like myself who love nothing more than drinking beer and playing the video games of yesteryear.

Anyway! We haven't actually got any plans to have Lunar Panda on display this year (as yet) but I'll still be in attendance at multiple expos enjoying the freedom that comes with not having to man a stall. So feel free to drop us an email if you're heading to any and want to catch up or if you have any other events to recommend.

Play Blackpool
3/4 May 2014
Buy Tickets

Revival, Wolverhampton
8/9 Aug 2014
Buy Tickets

CGE, Vegas
12/13/14 Sep 2014
Buy Tickets

An XNA Message Logger

Written by Dean Edis on .

Whilst developing Lunar Panda we wrote a very simple logger for capturing messages from the application. They would be written using Debug.WriteLine(), allowing us to examine them using a debugger. This was fine until, during beta testing, we wanted a simpler way for beta testers to be able to describe any issues they might find.

In comes a new message logger, built on top of our powerful ‘Layers’ code.

The implementation is still fairly simple, but the messages can now be accessed at runtime even without a debugger. We use SCROLL LOCK to toggle the visibility of the messages using a ‘layer’ on top of the main game screen.

Here’s an example. Notice how the layer is slightly transparent, allowing us to ‘dim’ the background and make the message text clear to read.