Porting XNA To WP7? A Few Tips And Lessons

Elbert Perez is done with his port of Scribble Defense to WP7 from Xbox and he’s shared his experiences on his site. A few interesting items that he’s noted about the work involved. It’s a good read but here are a few items that stuck out (in his words):

1. The emulator is not throttled, so if you are developing on a beefy machine then you will completely screw yourself over if you do not test your game on a phone before hand. My development machine is a Quad Core I-7, 4 gigs of ram, and a ATI HD 5730. The game runs like butter on my machine, but when run on the phone, it will choke on higher enemy count
2. The emulator is not enough to get the feel of the game. Holding a phone will be a different experience because for one you are not using the mouse as a touch device, and two the way you play will be different on the phone because you hold it different and have a far smaller screen
3. Touch Screen controls are a whole different paradigm than controllers and keyboard and mouse. Doing gestures like pinch, drag, and flick will not always work for a game because it might not be something the user might think of doing. Consider using buttons, and a lot of reminders to the user that this action is available to them.
4. You can get away with more on the smaller screen than on the Xbox. The good thing about the smaller screen is that you can cheat on a lot of particle effects by making them have a lower quality and quantity. Remember, the phone will only have a 1ghz CPU, and a even weaker GPU. If you relied a lot on the GPU on the Xbox, you will want to rely more on the CPU this time around

Interesting, especially that the emulator is not throttled so you can’t get a feel for a 1ghz chip. Want to see the game in its current state? Why not