This post is the introduction of a number of blog posts. To make it easier for you to find the parts you are interested in – here are the topics:
- Introduction (this post)
- Infrastructure ASP.NET – RadGrid, RadEditor (Localization, HTML WYSIWYG editing, …)
- Infrastructure Twitter – twitter API, linq2twitter
- Infrastructure WCF Server – WCF, Cache
- Infrastructure WCF Client – WCF, Silverlight
- Game animation - (RadTransitionControl, RadGauge, RadBook)
Cool look out of the (telerik) box - Extending the Transition Control – RadTransitionControl, RadGauge, RadBook
- Our iPhone apps – that’s why we made this game
- The live example – this is “early stage” but you can really win there!
Years ago we did a large multiplayer online game for a customer.
It was built with Flash MX, Microsoft IIS 6 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000.
This development was real a pain – the reason – our customer had his “very special” design ideas.
In other words – for him at least 10 different fonts, 20 different colors (magenta also) and a brutal mixture of foreground / background colors was “the state of the art”.
We made some “good old style” proposals – but last not least what we could do was not “impressive”.
We joined the team after two other companies failed – and what we found was a “rough idea”, a flash developer (building those “multicolored” things our customer likes), a professional composer for music, some lawyers, and so forth.
Anyhow – about two months later the “rough idea” turned into a “highly configurable promotion engine” and the flash films handling static content turned into a thing which was controlled via web services driven by a SQL Server.
That was the time we had to learn flash because it turned out that the flash developer was a “picture drawer” not really able to do action script and handle web service calls.
And after a short time (we also did the flash part at this time) a professional designer joined the team.
Unfortunately Silverlight didn’t exist at this time – and the separation of code / design was really hard.
But we built our own layers and so finally the designer made the film parts – and we revived them.
2006 we have been nominated for “BestPractice-IT” at CeBIT for this software!
This game was a kind of “social marketing toy” – and from it we learned two things:
Game mechanics – how an what people play.
Design is a hard thing 
To come to a point – so far we made three iPhone apps which sell… – let’s say they could do better 
We decided to do some kind of promotion. After some discussions we decided to build a little game to do this.
And we know – design is not our strength. The goals are:
- Show a lot of people our software
- Build the thing in a short time
- Give the players an even chance to win something
- Use existing skills / tools
The solution was to do something with twitter. We already have some routines from an earlier project I made.
Messing around with it (we needed to extend it) I stumbled over LinQ2twitter.
I want to thank Joe Mayo for this great piece of software.
Next we decided to use some new (and also “well known”) telerik controls.
Telerik has a new (CTP) control in their Silverlight Controls the RadTransitionControl.
This nice guy compensated some of our “design lacks”. Further we used the RadBook to show the game rules.
And (of course) for infrastructure needs we used the RadGrid for ASP.NET AJAX.
Since the RadTransitionControl is very new (CTP) I will show how to use this thing to achieve great effects without any “designer skills”.
I will divide the things in multiple parts – the first will be about infrastructure and I’ll show how I was able to build a “WYSIWYG” editor for game content.
Stay tuned
Manfred
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