First off, I have to give props to some of the 2D and 3D games that folks who have used our Beta1 or Beta2 software have been telling us about - amazing creativity! Thank you all for contributing to the forums and community.
We recently had an internal team event where everyone on the XNA team got some time to build their favorite apps. This was a bit different than the norm, since there wasnt any directed or targetted testing. It was, "let's use our product the way our customers would and see what we can do!" Having never built any serious games prior to working on XNA, I was absolutely blown away by the creativity on the team. Certainly, we have a number of experienced folks with direct experience in designing and developing games, but there are a number of us who dont .
My game was absolutely lame. I built a 2D Whac-a-Mole type of game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whac-A-Mole). I was able to start from scratch, learn how to construct a game, and complete it in roughly 2 days, complete with user input, graphics and sound. The lesson I learned here though, is that it's much harder to make a FUN game - complete with score, menu system, game logic, etc - than it is to make a game. But for a first time effort - not too shabby, (if i do say so myself)!
Some of the other games were also quite stunning. I happened to have a new hire join our team, and he was able to construct a right-scroll Toss game in about the same time as me. Others on the team were able to build 3rd-person-view camera games (imagine the view when walking around in Oblivion), top-down scrolling shooting games, puzzle games, 3D board games, etc.
If you havent downloaded XNA Game Studio Express Beta2, I suggest that you do it now. It's been available for about a month, and you can get learn about it and here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/XNA/default.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/gse/
