Free Developer Resources

Lets get this out of the road right up front...I'm a tight ass when it comes to spending money on development resources. I'm still dipping my toe in the water to get a feel for the WP7 platform and trying to gauge the effort / reward ratios and as such don't really want to drop a heap of money to produce something. So below is a list of resources I've used or intend to at some stage for my game Apple Bin. Hopefully this will be useful to someone, if you've got anymore feel free to list them in the comments.


Font

Having a custom font for your app really gives it a unique style. Font Squirrel has some top quality fonts, all you need to do is find the one for you!
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

Graphics

There are a fair few free graphics sites out and about. I've found this one to be good as a starting point for a lot of vector graphics. I think I've got about 4-5 elements from here but have altered them before putting them in Apple Bin
http://www.clker.com/

Audio

Kevin McLeod has some amazing tracks suited to games of all shapes and sizes. The interface is a bit clunky but stick with it and listen to the tracks on there and i'm sure you'll find something to suit your game or app.
http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

Lots of great sound effects in here. Grab Audacity to strip down the audio and customise it.
http://www.freesound.org/

Tools

Expression Encoder
I've done a little tutorial on my blog on this tool for getting a video onto YouTube. I think it's an excellent tool for getting something together quickly and easily.
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24601

Game High Scores
This is a free service, I've always intended to incorporate this but have never got around to it. From all reports, easy to use and did i mention it was free? :)
http://mogade.com/

Physics Engine
Based on the box2D engine, really active community and some really talented contributors.
http://farseerphysics.codeplex.com/

Allows you to use the Farseer engine and setup everything in blend. This is what I've been using for Apple Bin and have found it great.
http://physicshelper.codeplex.com/

*Not free but awesome

Audio
Check out the artist Soundroll in here. Tracks are about $10-15 but they all top quality.
http://audiojungle.net/

Using Microsoft Expression Encoder to put Windows Phone videos on YouTube

This post will show you how to use the free version of Microsoft Expression Encoder to upload a video of the windows phone emulator to YouTube.

First grab the Expression Encoder from the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24601

Once installed, fire up the screen capture utility which can be found in the start menu.

Hit the options icon in Expression Encoder. I like to set mine to 60 fps, but you can play around with these to see what gets you the balance between quality and size.

Next you need to run your app and hit the beg red record button in Expression Encoder. You should get a red selection screen to allow you to select the windows phone emulator.

You should then be able to record the emulator action. When you've finished hit the stop button to bring up all your recordings. Select the 'Send to Encoder' button in the lower right corner.

 Once it's in the encoder you can trim bits off it and insert snippets etc. Once you're happy we need to encode the video. Select File -> Encode

After your video is encoded log in to YouTube and upload it.

Windows Phone Theme Friendly Title in Blend

Today i'm going to show you how to make a windows phone theme friendly title within blend.

First step load up blend and add a text block. Make sure that the brush used for the text block is the PhoneForegroundColor. This is what's going to switch from black to white depending on the theme selected.

To add the reflect and fade text, copy and paste your existing text block. Drag it down a little bit so you can tell the two apart. In the brushes panel selected a gradient brush.

For the gradient, you want to go from a themed colour to a 0 alpha. Make sure the right slider is still set to PhoneForegroundColor and for the left slider click on it then in the editor set the Alpha (text box with an A on it) to 0. Play around with the left slider to get how much fade you like.

The next component is flipping and skewing the text block. For this we need transforms, scroll down in the edit panel till you get to the transform panel. The last tab on the right will enable us to flip the text block.

The final step is to skew the text block. It's still in the transforms panel, fourth tab along. For this I skewed the x axis by 44, but play around with this to see what works best for you.

Now you have a title that can be easily readable in light or dark themes.

If you want to see it in action. Here's the link for my free application.

Metro Match