JoeN's Blog : XNA Game Studio Express

XNA GSE Game: The Dishwasher : Dead Samurai

JoeN — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:25:00 GMT

One of the guys on the team just forwarded a great video from a GSE game "The Dishwasher : Dead Samurai".

It looks amazing and I love the visual style. It's great to see games like this popping up from the community.

I think the Dream Build Play competition is going to be generate quite a few interesting games!

Back to planning:-)

XNA Game Studio Express and Visual Studio

JoeN — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:30:00 GMT

Customers have used our product forums and Microsoft Connect to tell us that adding support for all versions of Visual Studio (Standard, Professional, etc) is a major feature they would like in the next major release of XNA Game Studio Express.

Delving into the feedback there are some consistent asks for specific features. The most common asks are:

Expanded debugging functionality. People want to use some advanced debugging features not available in Express (more debugger windows (threads etc), different breakpoint functionality (conditional, tracepoints etc) etc).
Source Code Control. People want to be able to check their projects into source code control.
Profiling information for Xbox 360 games. People want to get a better idea about the performance of their game on Xbox 360.

We are definitely investigating these areas and more but I wanted to extend an invitation to anyone to send me mail or add a comment about any specific Visual Studio feature they want to use while creating a game. I'll gather the feedback and make sure that we incorporate it into our planning.

Fire away!

Interview with GameCareerGuide

JoeN — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 21:01:25 GMT

I recently answered a number of questions about XNA Game Studio Express from Alistair Wallis at GameCareerGuide and the article has just appeared.

Visual Studio SP1 released

JoeN — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 22:54:30 GMT

Visual Studio SP1 has just been released. I'd encourage anyone using XNA Game Studio Express to install it. This SP has a number of fixes in it and from personal use it unblocks some Vista related issues.

Remember to install the Express version of the SP.

Where's the content?

JoeN — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 21:25:40 GMT

As a programmer I can understand code but I have little/no artistic talent. One of the key things we wanted to address with XNA Game Studio Express is making content a first class citizen in the IDE.

A lot of people today have two completely different systems when they build their game: one for code and one for content. Building content is a non-trivial task involving exporting, normalizing and processing content and then sequencing this with a relevant code build. We wanted to make this whole process simpler for enthusiasts so we have a pretty complete (and pluggable) content build system in XNA Game Studio Express. Michael talks about the content pipeline here.

But what good is a content pipeline without content? Well, buried away on the XNA Partners page is some links to some interesting things you might want to look at:

Autodesk FBX SDK - SDK for handling FBX files.
GarageGames Torque X - cool versions of their frameworks and tools using XNA Framework
SOFTIMAGE |XSI MOD tool - build your own models for your games
Turbo Squid - pick up some free models to prototype your game

I'm going to unlock the inner artist in me over the holidays and put some content through that pipeline.

Your World. Your Game.

JoeN — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 04:33:24 GMT

Relatively old news (well 12 hours to be exact) but we shipped the first version of XNA Game Studio Express today. Michael has some information about it here.

Shipping always makes me a little reflective and I wanted to share the fact that I have been a PM at Microsoft for over 7 years and have worked on two products:

C#
XNA Game Studio Express

I've had a lot of the different PM positions on these teams but it's amazing that I have "only" worked on two products.

I joined the C# team as the first full-time PM working on the C# compiler. The team at the time was around 8 people, 4 developers and 4 QA. I remember thinking at the time about the responsibility of bringing a new programming language to the world and we worked hard over the years to make sure that we had a world class solution that developers loved.

A few years ago I started to look around for a new challenge inside Microsoft. I wasn't expecting to find something that would change things as fundamentally as C# but along came XNA. Yet again I was the first PM on the team and over the last two years we've done a lot of listening and learning from people in the game industry. Now we are releasing XNA Game Studio Express and I'm as proud of it as I was of C#.

One of the things I love about working on development tools or frameworks is that they provide a platform for you to build incredible things. Our new tag line "Your World, Your Game" really captures our intention with the product.

Everyone has a great game idea but most don't have the tools to build it. I hope that XNA Game Studio Express gives you the tools that allows you to build that game you have always wanted to build.

Stay on target, stay on target...

JoeN — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 08:21:29 GMT

Kind of a strange title I know, but I started to the write a long blog entry about project systems (which I will post at some stage) but I wanted to get to the heart of a matter that members of the team are currently talking about.

The issue we are discussing is how important building a game that is guaranteed to run on both Windows and Xbox is to you. We expect many people to fall into the following working styles:

Develop primarily for Windows, at some stage build the game for Xbox 360.
Develop primarily for Xbox 360, at some stage build the game for Windows.

We are debating adding a third option to the list above - something like "develop for both platforms at the same time". Essentially this means making sure that as you program we modify the experience to make sure that you don't accidentally start using platform specific functionality (e.g. a mouse on the Xbox 360, reference a platform specific assembly etc).

To enable this option we would have to add a fair bit of functionality to the IDE - Intellisense filters, referenced assembly checks, perhaps some FxCop type post processing to get this right etc. It certainly is technically viable and it would be easy for us to dive into this work but I wanted to get people's reaction to this idea.

Is the third option a priority for you, or is it more of a nicety? The XNA Game Studio Express team is focused on making sure that games run on the platforms we support, so our natural tendency is to build out the third option, but I'm not sure that our customers will value it as highly as we do (or perhaps prefer us to work on other features).

We do want to address the current issue of having to have two projects (one for each platform), but how far do we go towards making sure that you "stay on the rails" if you want to build a game that runs on both Windows and Xbox 360?

I love to get any feedback on this issue - thanks.

XNA Game Studio Express and DEMMX awards

JoeN — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 20:18:43 GMT

XNA Game Studio Express has been nominated for awards in the following categories at the Digital Entertainment Media and Marketing Excellence awards:

Innovator of the Year
Game Innovation of the Year

I'll be flying down to LA for the event and let you know how it goes. Last year Xbox Live Arcade won in the same categories - wish us luck!

The Long Tail and XNA Game Studio Express

JoeN — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 19:50:55 GMT

One of the most interesting business books I have read lately has been the The Long Tail.

Given the planning work I'm doing with XNA Game Studio Express (getting close to shipping now!), it was a fascinating book and really helped articulate the "gut" feel that many members of the team feel when it comes to community generated games.

Many of the management team have also read that book as well, so that allows me to use some of the terminology in the book to help describe what we planning to do around sharing games. As I started to do more research I found that XNA Game Studio Express had been picked up by many people and linked to the Long Tail (including an article by the author himself). Some of the links I found were:

Chris Anderson (author of the Long Tail) also links to an post about some comments that Peter Moore (one of my indirect bosses) made at a conference around game development. A surprising number relate to the work that we are doing:

Beyond The Boys In Their Bedrooms. Appeal to a much wider audience.
Don’t Pass The Buck On Rising Development Costs. We need to find ways to reduce costs and restructure our revenue models.
Rebel Without A Platform: Bring Aspiring Developers Into The Fold. For too long we’ve expected the developers of the future to claw their way up to us … we have to start coming to them and proactively develop a farm team of future stars.
It’s A YouTube World: Embrace Community Created Content. We’re control freaks when it comes to how games are delivered to consumers. We need more spaces where garage designers can get noticed.
Set Us Free. We should look at delivering new IP in new ways that recognize how powerful a concept shaping your own gaming experience is.
We’re Too Cool For School: Make Ourselves More Approachable. Games are more powerful, but less approachable. We need to make more games for more people. Expand demographics, online gameplay, strong family settings.
Lower The Total Cost Of Ownership With Choice. Consumer should have choices, starting at entry level, purchases should be upgradable, don’t lock consumers in.
Treat Windows Like A Gaming Platform. Windows as a platform reaches more people than any console ever will.

I think that points 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 are particularly relevant to what we are doing.

So if you have the chance, pick up and read the Long Tail - it's well worth the read.

Slinking back onto the blogging scene

JoeN — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 09:34:26 GMT

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:

The final release of XNA Game Studio Express for this year. We know a lot of people are waiting for it.
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!