The guys over at Crazy Horse Gaming have kindly done a Playtest of Lunar Panda Deluxe as part of their Throwback Tuesday this week. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank them for helping us get the word out about Lunar Panda they've been extremely supportive of the whole thing and they even introduced us to the highly addictive world of Minecraft. Go and check their site out if you get a chance they've got some awesome content for gamers.

After a lot of hard work we're finally at the stage where we have a fully playable game! We'll be releasing Lunar Panda Deluxe in the very near future but in the interim if you're interested in getting hold of a beta copy for the PC version then drop us an email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we'll send you a free download link. We'd love to get your feedback and we'll even give you a free copy of the final game in return for your help.

In our first article we covered how we can write a simplified Photoshop-style API for displaying multiple textures on the screen, and we have since extended the code to several extra features:

Adding Parallax scrolling to your XNA code
Adding video layers to your XNA code
Reporting performance statistics in your XNA code
Adding 2D Pixel Effects to Layers
Collection of Layer Effects

I was going to hold off on showing you any more pixel shaders, but I recently wrote one which seems cool enough to show you now!

One of our original ideas for a level in Lunar Panda was for Mr Panda to disappear down a ‘wormhole’ at some point, and enter a ‘retro’ universe. We’d change our screen art so it was pixellated and had a limited color palette, making it look like it would in the ‘old days’ of gaming.

Alas that was never implemented, and shelved for a future game, but that didn’t stop me from investigating whether we could automatically achieve this effect using a pixel shader. It turns out we can get pretty close!