XNA Game Studio Team Blog

XBLIG Support

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:43:00 GMT

We are trying to create an updated list of users who are having issues logging into their XBLIG account or need other
technical support. If you are running into a technical or billing issue with XBLIG please send an email to
creators@microsoft.com using one of the subject lines listed below.

Please use ONLY one of these three subject lines, as we will use these to filter responses. If you have
multiple issues please send one issue per email:

ACCOUNT/LOGIN PROBLEM - <Username>
PAYMENT PROBLEM - <Username>
OTHER SUPPORT REQUEST - <Username>

In the body of your email include your XBLIG username and any relevant information. Prior to emailing, please be sure to review the Indie
Games FAQ as it may help in resolving your issue as well: http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-us/home/faq

Thanks!

Want a better chance to get your title on the dashboard?

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:53:10 GMT

If so, it would help to send better art work to us. A common reason we cannot feature certain titles is due to low resolution or poorly captured box art or screen shots. The recommended specifications are: High Res Layered Key Art – 4:3 format/minimum
300 dpi/no text or logos. Also, no cropping if possible.

If you would like to get ahead of the game (pun intended), please send your art to creators@microsoft.com

Thanks!

Win the opportunity to be mentored by Ian Livingstone OBE and Any Payne OBE along with a month’s free PR support with Microsoft’s “Power Up” competition!

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 02:52:10 GMT

Microsoft has launched a developer contest called 'Power
Up'. The competition is aimed at UK Inide Developers who want to develop and
publish awesome games for Windows 8. If you are using XNA today to
develop Xbox Indie titles why not port your existing titles or create a new
ones for the Windows 8 “Power Up” competition and be in with a chance to win
some “money can’t buy” prizes. We have worked with Monogame in the
UK recently at a University hack to port existing XNA games to Win8 RT and then
develop those games to be published in the Windows 8 Store. You can read more details here.

You can download Monogame for free at http://Monogame.codeplex.com,
Visual Studio Express for Windows 8 and Windows 8 evaluation for FREE from http://dev.windows.com.
For a step by step guide of how to migrate your XNA assets to Windows 8 see http://bit.ly/S3UuGK.

If you’re the winner of ‘Power Up’ you will win some amazing
prize, including a free PR campaign, mentoring with industry leaders drawn from
the Boards of UKIE and TIGA and a commercial trailer for your awesome Windows 8
game app. You simply need to ensure game is published in the UK Windows 8 Store
before December 14^th. Full entry details, terms and conditions
can be found at www.ubelly.com/gaming

Prizes range from free PR for a month, mentoring by industry
veterans, Nokia smartphones, Visa Gift Cards from YoYo Games to name but a few.

The competition is open now and you have until December 14^th,
2012 to enter.

To
be in with the chance of winning one of our fantastic prizes, after
successfully submitting your app to the UK Windows 8 store, follow the steps
below to enter the competition.

Send
the following details to Andrew Webber, UK Marketing Lead for Indie Game App
Builders at andrew@microsoft.com

Your name
Studio Name
Email Address and Phone
Number
Name of the Game App
Include a copy of your
Store Certification email for the App you are submitting.

There
is no limit to the number of entries, all entries need to be received by
11.59PM GMT 14^th December 2012.

The Xbox LIVE Indie Games portal Submission/Editing Issue Fix

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:44:00 GMT

There was an issue today with people not being able to submit, or edit games within the site.

^{We have found out that a new Terms of Use was posted. Since then, a user has to:}

^{Login to the Xbox LIVE Indie Games portal}

^{Go to the Membership page at}^{http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-us/home/membership}

^{Click on Join Now}

^{When you get to xbox.com, re-accept the TOU}

^{Manually navigate back to the
Xbox LIVE Indie Games portal

We are working on a way to fix this in a more global sense, but in
the meantime, this should fix the issue.

Thanks for your
patience.}

Dream.Build.Play Winners!

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 23:04:28 GMT

Meet the 2012 Dream.Build.Play Challenge winners! Thank you for your hard work, congratulations on your awesome accomplishment, and welcome to the Dream.Build.Play universe.

Go here to see the winners: https://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/winners.aspx

Dream.Build.Play Finalists

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 23:03:50 GMT

The games received for this year’s competition were phenomenal. Congratulations to the 40 finalists (listed in alphabetical order).

Xbox 360:

A Pixel Escape

Italy

Apple Jack 2

United Kingdom

Bleed

Canada

Brand

Canada

Chibis Bomba

France

Chompy Chomp Chomp

United Kingdom

Dead Pixels

United Kingdom

Diehard Dungeon

United Kingdom

Divided

United Kingdom

Face-Plant Adventures

Germany

Gateways

United Kingdom

Graveyard Shift

Portugal

Imagine Earth

Germany

Moon Cheese

Sweden

Ninja Crash

South Africa

One Finger Death Punch

Canada

qrth-phyl

United Kingdom

Snails

Portugal

Windhaven

United Kingdom

Wyv and Keep

United States

Windows Phone:

Air Soccer Fever

United States

Akane the Kunoichi

Italy

Alter Ego

Russian Federation

Bots n’Things

Canada

Brutal Chase 3D

Spain

Cradle To The Grave

United States

Digital Divider

Norway

Dotty 2

Germany

Ecosia

France

I, Zombie

Poland

Linkit

Brazil

Pirate Cat

France

Pixel Blocked!

Canada

Sidekick: End of days

United Kingdom

Skiddy

Italy

Smirkers

Malta

Snails

Portugal

Sparks – The First Light

Switzerland

Super Voltage

China

Valgards Fate

Germany

App Hub Maintenance

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 20:00:00 GMT

App Hub is currently offline. We expect the downtime to
last less than 24 hours. Rest assured our teams will be working as
quickly as possible to minimize the impact on you. Once the developer
portal is back online, you might still encounter an occasional hiccup as we
complete the back-end work over the next several weeks.

We appreciate your patience during the upgrade work.

Happy New Year, Xbox LIVE Indie Games!

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Welcome to 2012! We’re eager to see what our developers have in store for Xbox LIVE Indie Games in the coming year and to kick things off we have an exciting announcement regarding some changes to App Hub that make it a good time to be an Xbox LIVE Indie Games developer.

Higher maximum CCGAME size

Since the start of Xbox LIVE Indie Games, CCGAME bundles submitted for Xbox LIVE Indie Games were limited to a maximum size of 150MB. We’ve heard all the great feedback on this subject and today we are pleased to inform you that developers are now able to submit CCGAME bundles up to 500MB through App Hub for publishing on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.

New limit for 80 point games

Another area we’re adjusting today is the requirement that titles larger than 50MB be priced at either 240 or 400 points. After raising our maximum size we’ve decided to also raise this limit. Starting today you can apply the 80 point price to any game with a CCGAME size under 150MB, which is three times the current limit of 50MB.

More titles per developer

The last change affects a fewer number of developers, but we still believe it’s an important update. Originally developers were limited to just eight titles on Xbox LIVE Indie Games. When Creators Club became App Hub, we raised the limit up to ten. We’re happy today to let you know that we’re again raising this limit up to twenty titles per developer.

We’re continuing to watch our developer base and adapt the system to the needs of our creators. We hope you’re all as excited as we are to kick off 2012 with these great updates to the App Hub to enable our developers to make even better content for Xbox LIVE Indie Games. If you have any questions or want to discuss these changes, feel free to post in our forum thread.

Welcome to the New Xbox 360 Dashboard

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:00:00 GMT

Today is exciting. Why? Because today we welcome the newest update to the Xbox 360 dashboard.

What does this update mean to you, Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers? To start with, it means a new user interface and organizational and functional changes.

The new user interface uses the Metro style, the same style used by Windows Phone and Windows 8. There also are organizational and functional changes not only to improve, but to enhance, the game experience.

Today, we want to tell you about changes to the Xbox 360 dashboard we believe will most affect Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers and customers.

Rating from the game library

In the new dashboard, rating a game is easy. There now is a Rate button on the overview page for games that gives gamers quick access to rate the game's content.

The removal of the rate button from the game library in an earlier update generated considerable feedback. Its removal reduced the number of ratings given for Indie Games. We believe the permanent display of the rating button on game overview pages will increase the likelihood that your players will rate your games.

Indie exposure in the game marketplace carousel

When navigating into the game marketplace in the games section, you’ll notice the rotating carousel in the center contains an item for Xbox LIVE Indie Games. Selecting this item takes users to an Indie Games experience containing the Kotaku’s Favorites and Contest Finalists lists, as well as Indie Game specific New Releases and Most Popular lists.

This carousel item will help to push your games to even more customers by exposing Xbox LIVE Indie Games from the top level of the marketplace experience.

Bing search

Over the years, Xbox has become about more than just games. Users can now find music, movies, and television programming on their Xbox 360 consoles. With all this great new content, Bing was added to make it even easier to find what you’re looking for. Users can use Bing search to find marketplace content, including Xbox LIVE Indie Games.

The algorithms and index of content are still being improved, but we believe this exposure of Indie Game content through the Bing search engine makes it even easier for customers to find specific Indie game content without having to manually navigate the dashboard in search of the gem.

Recommendations

Another way Xbox is helping customers find great new content is through smart recommendations. Customers viewing a piece of content can now find recommendations for related games and content that might interest them.

Smart recommendations will help customers find Indie games related to games they already own and enjoy, which should translate into more opportunities for Indie developers.

We are sure each of you is as excited as we are about the new dashboard and can see all the great new ways Indie games have been exposed to our millions of Xbox LIVE subscribers. If you have feedback regarding the dashboard, please use the official Xbox.com forum.

New Games Developer Education on App Hub

XNA Game Studio Developer Education — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:05:00 GMT

Today, two brand-new educational items are available on App Hub for XNA Game Studio game developers, as well as a set of Visual Basic updates to our popular Windows Phone Mango educational items. Check out the Game Development educational page on App Hub to download these and other great educational items. Here’s what you’ll find there:

Compiled Content Format (XNB)

This article documents the format of the compiled data files (.xnb) produced by the XNA Game Studio 4.0 Content Pipeline build process, and includes a sample parser written in C++ to illustrate how to work with the format.

Windows Phone Localization for Games

This article provides a step-by-step guide and recommended practices to ensure a Windows Phone game project made in XNA Game Studio is localizable, using the Catapult Wars Lab as an example.

Visual Basic Updates to Mango Samples and Articles

Several of the popular Windows Phone Mango samples and articles have been updated to include Visual Basic support. Get in and try out the new VB versions today:

Game State Management

Paddle Battle

Migration Guide: Moving to Silverlight/XNA

Silverlight XNA Components

All of these items are also available on the Game Development education page.