The XNA Team has launched Dream-Build-Play 2008 . In Dream-Build-Play 2008 you can build your dream game to compete with other game developers around the world.  This year’s contest will feature Xbox360 development only and to ensure that everyone has access we will be giving away one free 12-Month XNA Creators Club Trial membership to everyone that registers.  Contestants will compete for $75,000 in prizes and the bragging rights to say their game was the best.  Additionally,

Yesterday the second Belgian Community Day took place in Keerbergen. I joined in a bit later due to some meetings at the office but it was still more than worth it. Nine Belgian User Groups joined in this year to organize a day “For the Community, By the Community”. I would like to thank all the people involved into getting this organized, I know it was a lot of work these last months. Special thanks to Ilse and Gill as they really made sure eveything was running. When I got there, halfway during

Work as an individual or in a team and build the ultimate game using XNA Game Studios 2.0 for the XBOX360 platform. $75K cash prize at stake plus by simply registering you will get a free 12 months XNA Creators Club Trial Membership. Find out more here!

The website for the new XNA Belgian User Group is live. The user group is geared towards all people interested in game development in Belgium, but clearly if you have no technical skills you can join in as well. Join the meetings to learn more and share your own knowledge. XNA-BUG is an initiative of Brecht Kets and Riemer Grootjans, both are MVP in Windows – DirectX/XNA. XNA-BUG Launch Contest For their launch the user group is organizing a game development contest where 2 Xbox consoles can be won.

Mission: To get XNA in the hands of trillions, in order to ensure XBOX Games like Halo3 continue to evolve so that I will eventually succumb to "death by XBOX 360". Training Requirements: It's simple men/women, ensure you show up at these key locations with your I'm an XNA Coder secret decoder ring (actually just show up wearing clothes and having at least showered once this week). Sydney Event: http://xnasydneypeteisensee.events.live.com/default.aspx Date: Nov 14 th 2007 @ 6:30PM Location:

In sort of a last-minute maneuvering, I am going to Gamefest this year. Gamefest is Microsoft's game technology conference, and after seeing the session tracks I am really stoked to go. Not only will the XNA framework posse I work with be showing off the cool tools and capabilities of the framework, there will be some sweet demos both in the keynote and at the XNA booth where I will be hanging out. I'm not going to ruin the fun, but I will try to do some blogging at the scene so you can hear more

Here's a flock of butterflies, brought to you in XNA, which can soar around their environment with the help of the Wii controller. By tilting and rolling the Wiimote, you can control the flight of the lead butterfly. The rest of the flock sticks together, chasing you wherever your accellerometer-fuelled flights of fancy take you. All the butterflies, including the one controlled by the Wiimote, avoid collisions with eachother, as well as with the features of the environment. [ Update: After showing

One of my favourite game designers of all time, Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts) once hammered home during a talk at the Game Developers Conference that all games are wish fulfillments . That probably explains why I played a lot of Guitar Hero 2 this week. (I was having trouble with the licks 'til I remembered Strong Bad's guitar advice , and then it all came back to me. And Uncle Bob, if you're reading this, yes I will pick up the real guitar again now.) Did you know that

An imminent update to the XNA Framework will allow for sharing of packaged XNA Game Studio Express Games. Developers will be able to package their binary games into a single file to share with other users of XNA Game Studio Express. These files can be emailed or hosted on websites like any other files. To run a game, you just double click a file and it will unpack to your Windows-based PC or Xbox 360 console. Now XNA can really enable the "YouTube of Games." Check out the other announced features

If there's one thing that the XBox teams seem to nail, it's the community orientation of sites like the new XNA Creators Club . It's the shiny new hub for all things XNA, including samples, downloadable games, video tutorials, developer forums, and more. I authenticated at the site in a few seconds using my Passport and XBox Live ID, and created a game-dev-oriented profile there. As always , I am YumYumMoose at the Club, and look forward to creating with you there. Game Developers Conference 2007