My last post was over 2 years ago (but who's counting)!

So what have I been up to in the last two years? Basically a lot of learning about different parts of the game business. Specifically I have been:

  • Attempting to understand different parts of the overall games business from different viewpoints (platform, developer tools, publisher, game studio, consumer etc)
  • Listening to professional game studios (all over the world)
  • Listening to people building DCC (Digital Content Creation) tools for game studios
  • Listening to hobbyist game developers
  • Working on various parts of XNA (XNA Studio, XNA Build and ARM, and most recently XNA Game Studio Express).
  • Attending many game conferences and presenting at a few of them (the last one was at Gamefest)
  • Playing games for "research" (which has included a serious and ongoing addiction to WoW, I was attempting to break free but the recent Southpark episode actually pushed me back into playing)

Over the last year or so I have been working solidly on XNA Game Studio Express (XGSE) as a Program Manager (but I am affectionately known as the "XNA Shaman" on the team). I have a great job - I generally have liberty to run around different parts of the product (tools, framework, Xbox 360 etc) and make sure that the overall experience and product feature set makes sense.

As a former member of the Visual Studio team (working on C#) I have a natural interest in the XGSE developer tools which means I get to write blog entries like this one. When I'm not working on XNA stuff, I work with different parts of the game developer group on some overall strategy work.

Currently I'm busy working on two things:

  1. The final release of XNA Game Studio Express for this year. We know a lot of people are waiting for it.
  2. Our game sharing story. Part of my job is looking at the different ways we can support game sharing for community created games.

I'm definitely going to try and blog more (about all sorts of things as well as my work) and we'll see whether I can sustain it. Let me know if you have any questions about XNA Game Studio Express or if you have ideas about how you would like to see game sharing enabled - I'm pretty good at listening!