Cool game!  I like the visuals and special effects, everything's presented really nicely. Knowing where you need to move to trap the beasties takes a bit of getting used to.  I found the enemies that came and destroyed the points I'd laid down really hard to beat which put me off by about level 3.  I think it could make a ...

I remember playing a game like this before, can't remember what it was called though! I found it hard to progress beyond a few levels because I ran out of teleports so there was nothing I could do.  I seem to remember in the version I played before that you could cause the nasties to collide and create an object equivalent to the land mines ...

What kind of card game are you trying to implement?  I posted a while ago with a class which dealt with cards but was centred around determining winning poker hands. http://forums.xna.com/thread/17563.aspx You'll need to be a bit more specific.  Are you looking for techniques for rendering cards, maintaining a deck, AI strategies for a ...

I wrote Shuggy which also won a top 20 place. I too have not received all of the prizes that were advertised.  I received an XBox 360 a while ago from Amazon with absolutely no indication it was a DBP prize.  It also wasn't signed which, although not exactly a major issue, is another depressing part of the prize giving.  It's ...

I've just added a second part to the Tiled Level tutorial on my website.  It adds coins which the player can collect and blobs which will hurt the player, it also covers managing all these objects in the level.  I've still tried to keep everything as basic as possible and show how the core mechanics work.  As you can tell ...

Shawn Hargreaves:There is no such thing as a default vertex shader. If you don't explicitly set a shader, you just get whatever was left over by whoever previously did set a vertex shader. Most likely, this means you will be picking up the SpriteBatch vertex shader (which scales texcoord0 from pixels into texture units, does not pass through ...

The ZMan [MVP/Moderator]:Are you using SpriteBatch? That has a built in vertex shader which converts the rectangles you pass in into 0..1 range? No, I'm calling DrawUserPrimitives() using my own vertex type consisting of VertexElementUsage.Position(0), VertexElementUsage.TextureCoordinate(0) and ...

Thanks for the response Leaf.  Looks like my problem is why I have to specify the texture co-ordinates in pixels.  I'm definitely specifying pixels in the XNA code which end up being in the range [0..1] in the pixel shader.  I'm not using a vertex shader, does anyone know if the default one would perform a mapping like this ...

I currently have a shader effect which I'd like to pass two different textures into.  I also want to use TEXCOORD0 and TEXCOORD1 to specify the different texture co-ordinates for each texture.  I only want to render a small quad from the first texture (which is 512x512 pixels) so the co-ordinates are something like ...

I'm still working on Shuggy, hoping to have it finished sometime next year. I wasn't planning on entering the competition this year but seeing the warm up details got me thinking about an idea.  I won't be entering the main competition but I think I'll do something for the warm up.  If things work out I'll probably add it into Shuggy as ...