Catalin on 2D Skeletal Animations
Catalin “Too Proud To Self-promote” Zima (you might know him as our local XNA MVP Captain ZSquare) has a nice write-up of 2D Skeletal Animations over at his blog. So, if you ever wondered what the benefits of skeletal animations in the 2D world as compared to our beloved sprite sheets are, his post would be your starting point to explore this very topic.
Dedication for Captain boki
And here's the screenshots for Captain boki 
Best wishes,
Captain ZSquare
Screen-space deformations in XNA for Windows Phone 7
Captain ZSquare shares his technique to do screen-space deformations on Windows Phone 7. Introduces Catalin:
Working on our games, we came across the need to do some screen-space deformations for all sorts of special effects like explosions, ‘drunk filter’, warp effects and other similar stuff. But since we’re targeting Windows Phone 7, we don’t have access to any custom shaders (which is a bummer), so we had to be creative. In the end, the solution turned out to be rather simple, and the performance is good enough (if you don’t go overboard with the effects, of course).
See the post for screen shoots and code!
Lets see if Captain ZSquare reposts this one with a screen shoot, too
XnaFlixel for XNA 4.0
Someone be the handle of graydsl announced the immediate availability of XnaFlixel on GitHub. Sez the laddie:
XnaFlixel is a XNA 4.0 port of flixel (http://flixel.org). It's highly experimental now and I'm planning to break the whole API to make it more C#-ish. It's not tested on Xbox yet, so if you plan to use it, don't expect to much.
Xnaml Component
Following Red Badger’s XPF here comes another Silverlight in XNA component to continue the promise of Bronzeglow: Xnaml Component. Valentin – its creator – asks for beta testers in the AppBuh forums, so head over to his contact form and, well, contact him.
XNA Tile Engine Base Solution for WP7
Gareth Williams has posted news of his Tile Engine solution for XNA which runs on Windows Phone 7.
And a handy list of all the features of the solution:
- Suitable for side-on and top-down games
- Good for platformers, RPGs, shooters, racers, adventures - anything that needs tiles!
- Works in landscape or portrait with one line change.
- Built on the Windows Phone 7 XNA Gamestate Management engine sample.
- Uses Nick Gravelyn's content pipeline extension for the "Tiled" editor.
- Simple but flexible camera class that clamps to the map boundaries.
- Draw the whole map at once, or one layer at a time for flexibility.
- Parallax scrolling simply by adding a couple of properties to a layer in Tiled.
- An overload to draw a layer as "shadows" by drawing offset+black+semi-transparent.
- Per-pixel colour-based collision detection on specified layers/tilesets.
There's a link to the sample project on his blog, please read the rest of this post along with trying out the sample.
Source
Jemgine: Now for XNA 4.0
Mr "My engine is better than your engine" Blecki has very kindly updated his XNA Engine to XNA 4.0.
A reminder that you can get the latest source on codeplex
There isnt much else to but .. Awsomesauce... you should go download it immediately.
Read direct from the source here
Article: Arbitrarily Shaped Secondary 2D Viewports
by Harry Trautmann
This tutorial shows a technique to implement a secondary 2D viewport which has a shape that does not need to be rectangular, but can be customized by the programmer. Even moving sprite shapes are possible. Utilized code techniques: secondary rendertarget (of XNA Game Studio 3.1) and an alphamap by a pixelshader (PS 2.0).
This tutorial is for beginner to intermediate level programmers. At least you should know the oo basics and know the nitty-gritty about the XNA framework. Also, basic shader programming is explained somewhere else (e. g. here: http://www.sgtconker.com/2009/11/crash-course-in-hlsl/)
Article: XNA Farseer Platform Physics Tutorial
by Roy Triesscheijn
Today I’m going to introduce you to a neat 2D physics engine for XNA called Farseer. With the help of this 2D physics engine we are going to create a small platform ‘game’ while introducing the important concepts of Farseer like bodies, geometry, joints and springs.
By the end of the tutorial, you'll be able to build something like:
Article: Rolling World Tutorial
by Christian Schlager
When you look around the XBox Indie Games Channel, there aren't a lot of 3D games around. Most XNA games only feature 2D graphics. I hope to contribute with this tutorial to making 3D graphics a bit less intimidating. And maybe the little prototype we will create throughout the next pages will be the starting point of a great 3D indie game by one of you
We will make a prototype that features the kind of rolling world effect that you can see in games such as Animal Crossing or DeathSpank. We will also create the textures and 3D models that go along with the rolling effect and recreate the combination of 2D art with a 3D world you can see in the game DeathSpank.