Imagine Cup: I can’t get my Phone game to look good, it’s hopeless, I got other stuff to do, I don’t get it
Yep.
The impossible can be ambiguous. And hard. And when you do the impossible the documentation generally sucks.
I have heard it all. Usually the teams with the worse complaints are the ones that are generating the best code, they are pushing the edge, doing what Americans have done well within the short historical times that the US has been in existence. But the Chinese, South Americans, and Europeans have at one time or another accomplished great things as well and currently have competitive developers. Take for instance Brazil, please, these are the wild, enthusiastic, teams at the Internationals, and they do quite well. Brazil is awesome. The Chinese, again, blasting away at the code, and doing quite well.
American students are competitive, definitely, and for the next week, all I ask is that you give it a shot and turn in what you have.
Why? Solving big world problems can lead to mundane, but large amounts of wealth. Are there a lot of big world problems that are unsolved? Why yes there are, and this means opportunity for you. Phone games and Phone base products can easily reach millions of customers all pay a small amount to you. If you aren’t interested in wealth, then you can do the non-profit thing for sure, but a bunch of people we need the mundane trappings of wealth to be happy, or least comfortable in our misery. (As the saying goes: Money doesn’t buy you friends, but it does purchase a better class of enemies.)
Soooooo, there has been a change to the Phone Games, and that is what I really want to discuss with you.
Silverlight and XNA, you need to use both and the documentation isn’t all that great, opportunity for you! Read this blog for more information as I pump it out.
My standards are lower than the Imagine Cup, I can give you a lot of help after your project is defined for the Imagine Cup and turned in. Then we can collaborate on getting 10 phone projects completed and submitted for certification in the Windows Phone Marketplace. I can’t do much collaboration with you on the Imagine Cup, but I want to give my priority to students who gave the Imagine Cup a shot.
So how do you overcome that documentation with Catapult game, HoneyComb rush? All of the mysterious classes that are referred to and don’t work if you miss a step?
Do the following, short (really, but not really short) tutorial on using Silverlight with XNA:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202938(v=VS.92).aspx
It is a world changer, and you could succeed with this information.
Don’t tell anyone. 