He is the very experienced developer in Windows Phone who has developed many games and applications.

He is the famous developer in OpenXLive who launched two popular games of Super Hoops and Alien Bubble Blast.

He is also the influential technology evangelist who helps quite a few developers solving technical issues, adds the advertisement system into OpenXLive, and shares experiences with all.

He is Andy Kachelmeier, named SyntaxUnknown in OpenXLive and the owner of Flying Code Monkeys.

Let’s know more stories of Andy.

1. Would you please introduce yourself?

Hi! My name is Andy Kachelmeier, but I go by “SyntaxUnknown” on OpenXLive and other sites. I’m a 39 year old software engineer who lives in Wilmington, Ohio which is just outside of Cincinnati. Before living in Wilmington, I grew up in San Marcos, California, which is just north of San Diego.

2. When did you start programming and what was your fist application?

Way back in 1983, my dad brought home an IBM PC from work complete with a copy of the original Microsoft Flight Simulator. I was addicted to computers from that point forward and was fascinated with their inner workings. I taught myself DOS and BASIC from the original IBM hard-cover manuals and wrote my first game I simply called “Cat and Mouse” which was an overhead view of a maze where you tried to catch a mouse (which was just a circle drawn on the screen that would move randomly through the maze). Not bad for a 12 year old, huh?

From there, I ventured on through the technologies over the years. College introduced me to Assembler, Pascal, FORTRAN, C, and C++. Through my professional career after college, I have stuck mostly with Microsoft technologies with the exception of a few years devoted to some Java products just before .NET was released.

3. When did you start the game development on Windows Phone 7? Would you like talk to about Flying code Monkeys and it’s projects?

I started Windows Phone 7 development in October of 2010. I had meant to get into it earlier, but my “day job” didn’t allow me much time and really, the tools were much more mature by the time I got into it.

I started by writing Silverlight applications and my first on the Marketplace was “Pocket Password Safe” because due to a bug in the Marketplace search at the time, it had looked like there was just one password managing app published. What’s funny is that when my application was published, there was also about 20 other password apps published at the same time because other developers saw the same thing, so sales were pretty low.

I then built a number of Traffic Camera applications to experiment with Ad-based applications. The results were better, but nothing great, so I wanted to try the game path next.

4. Can you talk a little about Super Hoops and its development experience?

I have been using a 2D gaming engine called “FlatRedBall” for years on a bunch of side projects and also found that the Farseer physics engine plugged nicely into that framework, so I developed a nice framework that incorporated both which was later used as the basis for Super Hoops.

One thing that always drug my game development down was building the graphics and for years, I hand drew assets and eventually I would just get frustrated and the game would stall. For Super Hoops, I stumbled onto Blender which is a wonderful 3D modeling application that is Open Source and basically free to use. I spend weeks learning the application and it has been a boon to my game development. Now, I can generate graphics as quickly as I can code and some of my early Blender work is visible in Super Hoops.

5. How did you learn about OpenXLive? How do you like the platform so far? What would be your top comments or requirements for it?

I discovered OpenXLive from a Windows Phone blogging site that wrote up a brief article on the framework. I took a brief look at it originally and decided to dig a bit further into the examples to see what it was all about. As I got into it, I was really taken back by how much work and time the framework would save me for all my games.

At the time, I was struggling through creating a main menu for the game. There was a ton of graphics to create and I had to create a menu system from the ground up which would take weeks. After completing the OpenXLive tutorials, I had my main menu and just about every other missing functionality completed for Super Hoops in just a couple hours. Once that happened, I was completely hooked on the framework and all the power that is behind it.

Eventually, I would love to see OpenXLive be able to bring multi-player gaming to Windows Phone 7 (lobbies, messaging, game networking), but I think that is probably going to have to wait for the Mango release as more network services are made available to 3rd party applications.

6. What is your future plan on Windows Phone 7 development? What will be your next game and when will it be released?

I’m currently working on making the jump from 2D to 3D applications and I have several games in the works. I’ve moved on from FlatRedBall/Farseer to a beautiful 3D engine called Sunburn and a 3D physics engine called BEPU. It is very exciting and the games look incredible, especially since I was able to use Blender to create the models I use for the games.

The first game completed will probably be “Turret Gunner” and the concept right now is that you’re starship is navigating an asteroid belt and you man one of the ship’s turrets to keep the asteroids from ripping into the hull of the ship. You tilt the phone in any direction to control the gun and tap buttons on the screen to fire. I’m trying to get it ready for sometime in June/July, but things are pretty busy in my “day job” which takes precedence.

The other game in the works in called “Canyon Racer” which is much more technically challenging which is why it won’t be done for a little while. In that game, you control a vehicle that you navigate through a canyon filled with obstacles for the best time.