XNA Essentials

I’ll be blogging about the SIEGE Conference on my personal blog soon, but I did want to at least put up my PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave this past Saturday. I received a lot of good feedback. It was a challenge getting to demo the 360 since it has to be connected to the internet. Overcoming Hotel WiFi restrictions is always fun.

In general, this conference was really good. I had a great time networking and talking to folks. I met a professor and some of his students who are using my book in their class this year. That was really cool. Also meeting the co-founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell and chatting with him was pretty awesome. If you are interested in any of that, make sure you check out my personal blog where I put non XNA related content.

Feel free to download the presentation slides.

I’ve done this presentation a couple of times so far. The PowerPoint presentation without the actual talk doesn’t mean too much by itself, but I have included it as is for folks to refer back to that attended the talks.

Everyone can feel free to download it.

The core of the talk is about best practices when developing games for the Xbox 360 to be sold on Xbox LIVE Marketplace as an Xbox LIVE Indie Game (XBLIG). The slides also mention some ways to use the same code written for the XNA Framework to then be repurposed for a Silverlight game thanks to SilverSprite and even for the iPhone thanks to XNATouch and MonoTouch and Mono.

The best practices section was taken from the chapter in my book “Best Practices for Creating an Xbox LIVE Community Game”.

The last section (bonus!) talks about developing games for the Zune HD. For more information, check out my original blog post where the code can be downloaded.

Happy Programming!

-Chad

It is official! Xbox LIVE Community Games is now Xbox LIVE Indie Games. The name change will be reflected on xbox.com and Xbox LIVE Marketplace later this summer.

The name change isn’t the only thing happening. The prices options for the games are being changed. The days of listing a game for 800 points (about $10 USD) is coming to an end. To me, it was really difficult for a Creator to compete against expansion packs, and XBLA titles anyway. The new price points will be 80, 240 and 400.

On the Creators Club Online site itself there is a new shiny thing called Reputation. The idea is great and hopefully it will inspire Creators to review and test more games. More information about Reputation can be found here.

Upgrades to Xbox LIVE Indie Games will now be automatic! So if you push out an update to your game, the gamer will be asked if they want to download the most updated version of the game. Very cool!

Also, now Creators get a maximum of 50 tokens for their games. This will allow the Creator to give media outlets an easy way to review their game.

New Countries can now submit Indie Games – Germany and Japan. There are also updates for Sweden and Singapore.

For a complete list of the changes see the official story on the XNA Creators Club Website.

There is no time like the present to create your dream game. Get to it!

Happy Coding!

-Chad