Writing on their Facebook wall, the team talk about their Unity framework that sits inside the Windows Phone XNA developer environment:
What we have done is to recreate a version of the Unity framework within XNA. This allows us to build and design the game within Unity and build it in XNA and eventually play it on our Windows Phone. For a Unity centered studio like ours, it has been great because it has allowed us to maintain our usual workflow within Unity.
Now we want to share it. Lately we have been contacted by several studios who wants a go with it – and we finally came to the conclusion “why not!” The idea is now to make it an open source project and see where it goes. If you are interested in using it, you may also be interested in contributing to it, and that way we may actually get something back from our efforts.
To stress availability, it is not yet available, as there is a bit of work before the (likely ugly) internal code is suitable for going open source (and I suspect the lawyers need to sort out a few things as well, and check all the internal coding comments so phrases such a "need this hack here to ensure it works on handset A and retains compatibility with everything else in the market"), but we'll be watching this with interest.
And hats off to Press Play. They could have lkept this as their own Rosetta Stone, but by opening it up for every developer, the reward to the Windows Phone ecosystem is huge... and that growing market will likely help Press Play sell a lot more applications and games.
More games like Tentacles could be on the way!
What we have done is to recreate a version of the Unity framework within XNA. This allows us to build and design the game within Unity and build it in XNA and eventually play it on our Windows Phone. For a Unity centered studio like ours, it has been great because it has allowed us to maintain our usual workflow within Unity.
Now we want to share it. Lately we have been contacted by several studios who wants a go with it – and we finally came to the conclusion “WHY NOT!”.
The idea is now to make it an open source project and see where it goes. If you are interested in using it, you may also be interested in contributing to it, and that way we may actually get something back from our efforts.