Nick Gravelyn

Software developer. Awesome guy.

About Me

My Projects

I'm a twentysomething software developer with a passion for game development.

I love building technologies to enable game developers. I currently work at Microsoft building tools and APIs for game developers on Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox 360.

When I'm not writing code, I can be found wandering Redmond, taking trips to the local dog park, or hiking one of the many mountains that surround the area.

Dungeon 2011

Dungeon is a small HTML5 demo showing dynamic dungeon generation as well as basic rendering using the HTML5 <canvas> tag. There's some good code for dungeon generation and some kind-of-ok code for a few different visibility algorithms.

XNA GS 4.0 Refresh 2011

An update to XNA GS 4, the Refresh brought support for Windows Phone 7.5 including integration between Silverlight and the XNA Framework rendering APIs, a feature I helped design.

Pixel Man 2 2011

Pixel Man 2 is the game that almost happened. A re-imagining of Pixel Man with 3D graphics, power ups, and more. I lost my focus and energy for the title and never finished it, so I open sourced it for others to learn from.

Pixel Man Zero 2011

Pixel Man Zero is a free, ad-supported version of Pixel Man on Windows Phone. Besides just porting the game, I added in Ms. Pixel Man as a character and full save/resume functionality so you can play in little chunks.

flip3 2011

I first made flip3 for iOS in 2009 and remade it on Windows Phone when it launched. It's a spin on tic-tac-toe where your forth move causes your first to disappear. It gives the game a bit more strategy and means there's no such things as ties. Plus it looks pretty awesome in the Metro UI theme.

XNA GS 4.0 2010

My first product as a Microsoft employee was XNA Game Studio 4.0. XNA Game Studio 4.0 brought a lot of great changes to the framework as well as adding support for Windows Phone. I'm pretty proud to have been a part of this.

Pixel Man 2009

Pixel Man was an attempt at making a very retro, minimalized platformer. It barely has graphics and the gameplay is intentionally very simple. However I always did enjoy it.

Zune HD Games 2009

If you've played a game on Zune HD, odds are I worked on it. I did contracting at Microsoft for nine months during which I worked on a bunch of games for Zune HD. I also wrote a UI framework and game framework for building apps and games.

Bloc 2008

Bloc was my first real finished game. It's like a mash up of two stick shooters and a color matching game. The controls are a bit hard for most people, but I still like it. Plus Ars Technica said it was awesome.