Pixel Engine

My foray into Flash development has come to an end - at least for the moment. I love the easy deployment of Flash games, and I was reasonably happy with the dev environment, but not being able to get a solid framerate was a deal-breaker for me.

I really liked the simplicity of working with simple 2D pixel graphics, though, so I spent last week putting together a little pixel graphics engine on top of XNA. I borrowed some of the ideas I liked from FlashPunk, combined them with bits from my 3D engine, and soon had something pretty workable on my hands.

The cool thing is that I've kept all of the XNA dependencies very isolated, so it should be easy to port to another .NET-based platform (MonoDroid and MonoTouch come to mind).

As you can see in the above video, I've got my little Kung Fu game ported over to the new platform. After my flash experience, it was great to see it running nice and smooth (although you can't tell that from the video - I still haven't figured out how to get smooth video on youtube...)