Mobile World Congress 2013

Tomorrow morning I will be leaving for Barcelona to attend this year’s Mobile World Congress. MWC is of course the biggest event for all things mobile in the world and this will be the first time I attend it. After attending last year’s Build in Redmond, WA and Microsoft Partner Conference the year before in LA, CA I guess I am getting the hang of going to big technology related and non-academic conferences for the first time :) After finishing my PhD last year, this seems like the next best thing, since I’ve been to quite a few academic conferences during my studying time anyway.

So back to Barcelona, MWC will take place between February 25 and February 28 in a new venue, not that I knew the old venue. The new venue is called Fira Fran Via which is apparently an awesome state of the art event space. I am sure the venue cannot possible beat being to Microsoft’s HQ building complex in November, but I’ve been to Barcelona 3 times already and I like the city and the people, so at least it will be much closer to where I live (no more crossing the Atlantic ocean – yey) and in Europe for a change.

I will arrive on Sunday and attend the Mobile Sunday event, where apparently will be lots of cool people and free beer tasting. The event  will begin at 6pm, look for me there if you want to meet up and discuss games over beers (what better way is there?). I will be wearing my MonsterUp t-shirt if it’s not too cold:) I will try to where these everywhere (I have a few of them) so you can find me:)

On Monday I will be attending Nokia’s separate event all day long. There is a keynote at 11am where I hope we get to see all new shiny awesome Lumia phones and (why not) the first Nokia tablet. That would be awesome ;) There are quite a few interesting sessions throughout the day, including game development sessions which I will make sure not to miss (in both Track 1 and Track 2) but the main thing I will try to do is talk to Nokia people about working with them for more Lumia games from Karios Games.

Tuesday will be a bit more relaxed. I think about going to Connected Living and Clicksoftware sessions about HTML5. I already have a couple of games on Facebook and Chrome Store using HTML5 so there might be a few things to learn there.

On Wednesday there are a few interesting things. I will try to attend the Generation ‘M’ session as well as the App Planet Open Forum.  After the congress, I will also try to be at WIPJam and Mobile Mixology parties. They are not very close to each other but I will do my best!

Finally, Thursday is going to be WIP-ADC day. Many interesting topics there so I will most likely spend the whole day attending these. After this, straight to the airport.

So if you are there, drop a line! I will try to tweet and otherwise write about the event here and on my twitter account (@marioskar) so if you are interested about WMC, make sure to follow me!

To celebrate the release of MonsterUp for iOS devices, I decided to dedicate a website only to MonsterUp branded games. I have 3 games already using the MonsterUp brand, the original MonsterUp, its sequel MonsterUp Adventures and a kids’ memory matching games called MonsterUp Memory. Since I plan to use the brand on future games as well, a dedicated simple website for all things MonsterUp seemed like a good idea. So I bought the domain monsterupgame.com, installed wordpress and presto – I had a website in about 4 hours :)

It has most of the things I wanted to have, like reviews and screenshots showing on devices’ pictures. I had to hack the template a bit to support multiple platforms, since it was originally supporting only iPhone apps, but I think it works the way I want it to work now.

So, take a look and tell me if you like it :)

www.monsterupgame.com

With summer in full swing, it is actually most likely preferable to head to the nearest beach to cool off, than stay in and play some good old fashion video games. But wait! That is why we have mobile phones these days, it seems, so that we can take gaming wherever we go, right? Well, many people have Windows Phone devices, and have been enjoying Galaxium, my space shooter, for a little over a year now. So I though it was time to give something to the even more people who walk around with iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads in their pockets these days. And I did, Galaxium has been in the App Store for a little more than a week now, and people from all over the world have been downloading it already. If you have an iOS device, you can do the same, by following this link. Galaxium on the iPhone has the exact same gameplay, bonus, enemies and bosses as the Windows Phone version, and there are a small differences as well, like the different menu layout and the Game Center support for the iPhone.

But how did we port the game I hear you ask, since Galaxium has been developed using XNA and C# which are not available for the iOS platform? Did we rewrite the game in Objective-C? The answer is no. The game is a direct port, even using the exact same code, using the most excellent tools provided by MonoGame, MonoTouch, Mono and MonoDevelop. These tools allow game developers to use their beloved C# and XNA skillset to write games that write in oh-so-many different platforms, including Linux, MacOSX, iOS, Android, PlayStation, Windows 8 and more. It’s every XNA game developer’s dream come true! It’s not perfect, but it’s stable enough to port most games already written in XNA to any of the platforms above. And you don’t have to take our word for it. We did it with Galaxium, we will do it with more games in the future and there are also some very nice examples in MonoGame’s website. There you can also find tutorials and documentation to get you started. What are you waiting for?