XNA Game Studio Express, Gamefest and the XNA Team Blog

aL [MSFT] — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 09:16:00 GMT

It's been awhile since I've written anything... Since I need to get to bed soon to get ready for Gamefest in seven hours, I'll try to keep this post brief :)

First, we have an XNA team blog available here. This blog will be the primary source for all information related to XNA Game Studio and XNA Build. Our Product Unit Manager [our head honcho], Boyd Multerer, has started the first post.

In about eight hours Gamefest will start -- and that will bring a bunch of new and exciting announcements. At Gamefest one of the big announcements that we are making is the XNA Game Studio series of products. These are completely new tools based on Visual Studio that will provide the XNA Framework and Content Pipeline to help developers build games. In my previous post I mentioned increasing developer productivity -- the XNA Framework Content Pipeline is going to do exactly that in a BIG way. Be sure to check out Mitch Walker's [XNA FX PM]and Micheal Klucher's blog [Content Pipeline PM] for more detailed information.

At Gamefest, we will be dropping the big bomb announcement as well. Technically I can't post the big announcement at this very moment, but resourceful folks can check around some Microsoft sites [hint: see below] and guess.

We believe that as a whole we can help usher in a new era of creativity and homebrew development around Windows and Xbox 360. One of our key goals is driving down the difficulty of creating games and bring game development to a more wider audience. In turn we think the community will expand upon our platforms and build games and other "game-like" applications that will be unique and novel and help drive innovation back into the industry. XNA Game Studio Express is only the beginning...

P.S. We will try our best to have a MDX 1.1/MDX 2.0 migration guide (in beta) along with XNA Game Studio Express Beta 1.

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Sign-up for XNA Game Studio Express Beta 1 (includes XNA Framework)
XNA Developer Center

Albert Ho's XNA Redux : XNA Game Studio Express

XNA Game Studio Express, Gamefest and the XNA Team Blog