Tom Clifton's Blog

This is a long overdue post summarising what I’ve been up to the past month and explaining my blogging absence. I have been incredibly busy with Uni work, games for Microsoft and other projects. This will continue to be the case till May so sadly I will be a bit quiet on the blogging front till then. [...]

Yesterday I discovered some of the issues associated with developing with MonoGame, namely that as it is such a new implementation of XNA, and still in development, not all features you would hope are implemented. That said there are fixes out there if you’re prepared to look hard enough. I decided to spend yesterday porting [...]

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a dual boot system with Windows8 and your current Windows system. This can be quite handy if you want to try out Windows 8 but are not ready to give up your old OS. The first thing you need to do is download [...]

Hyper Spaced Hyper Spaced is a fast paced stylish shooter for Windows 8 and Windows RT. Your spaceship has malfunctioned in HyperSpace and dropped out in enemy territory. You must fight off waves of enemies whilst trying to find plasma to refuel your HyperEngine. Only then can you escape the enemy! Hyper Spaced has 4 [...]

So I applied for a position as a Microsoft Ambassador a few weeks ago. I have been shortlisted for the position and now must complete a game for the new Windows Store by the 4th Feb as an interview task. We were advised to use either GameMaker, Construct 2 or MonoGame to keep things simple [...]

Although I actually began work on my final year project late last year, my coursework demands over Christmas meant that I did not make as much progress as I would have liked. But that is out of the way now and I have to present my first demo for the project in late February so [...]

First off this was the first Ludum Dare that my team and I have competed in. We decided to enter the 72 hour jam as a team so that we could create a more complete game than if we had entered the 48 hour compo. Initially we had a large team planned but a few [...]

The 25th Ludum Dare will be kicking off in a few hours. This will be the first ludum dare I’ll be competing in and the second game jam. For those of you unaware Ludum Dare is an online game jam in 2 flavours. The first is a 48 hour solo competition, the second is a [...]

So I have managed to fix one of my big issues with my point light implementation although one is still causing me problems. I can now view the light at any range. Previously I was having issues when the camera entered the light’s bounding sphere. I couldn’t understand why as I was enabling clockwise culling [...]

So I finally found the problem I was having with my point lights, and as usual by fixing that problem I have found a host of new ones – Joy! But I’m just glad to have found the problem, and am hoping these new problems are easier to fix. It turned out to be my [...]