I have been remiss in following news at Very Silly Games this summer. Fortunately for me Brian Scarbeau has been paying better attention. From his blog I found out that Rob Miles is about ready to release some curriculum materials for teaching programming using XNA. Rob has written a great text book called Microsoft® XNA Game Studio 2.0: Learn Programming Now! that I know a lot of teachers are using. Having some curriculum materials from Rob seems very interesting to me. Rob says “ It will be based

OK it is the start of the long weekend – well once my wife gets back from school where she had just a little more to do to be ready for students on Tuesday. So it is time to think about some game news. OK so I’m thinking about more help to create games since I really think that turning consumers into creators should be a goal. So hear now the news. The Popfly team announces a bunch of new features. The Game Creator has gone from alpha to beta and with this there are badges to earn, new profile pages,

I just found out about the RampUp program. Briefly this is a program that lets people sign up for and take online training on various Microsoft developer technology such as web development and Visual Studio. There are special tracks for Java developers and for developers who want to upgrade their skills from Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET. Speaking of the later, the description is: Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 is the ideal environment for a Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 developer to extend existing

I wish I had Dan Waters’ creativity. Recently Dan posted a how to video to introduce the peer to peer Zune game he created . There are a couple of points Dan makes about this example that make it a good learning project. Zune games are perfect for peer-to-peer because of their relatively low processing power and the lack of a central server (unless it's a Zune). Peer-to-peer means everyone is running an instance of the same program - there is no client or server. Thusly, to implement a lobby, you

Well I see over at the XNA Team Blog they have announced the latest Dream Build Play competition for people creating XNA Games for the XBOX 360. 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

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/27/who-cares-how-fast-the-code-is.aspx'; Ironically one of the problems teachers can have with teaching about optimizing programs is that computers are a) so fast now and b) getting faster all the time. Students often do not see the need to create more efficient algorithms because they assume that what they have is fast enough and if it isn’t then the next computer they buy will “fix” the problem by being faster. And truth be told with most

While many have had the chance to play the N.A.M.E game, some creative seeds have been sewn.  I'm getting several questions coming through about how to create a Zune game. To build your own Zune game, there are several points of optimization unique to developing for the Zune device itself (limited screen space etc) as well as using C# and XNA Game Studio Express 3.0 CTP.  Through the course of making his first Zune game Paul Oliver of Legendary Studios came up with some useful tips and

Recently N.A.M.E hit the front page of the GameGirl Blog !  GameGirl is a HUGE gaming blog with an all female cast of contributors - providing a fresh take on the world of video gaming.  The article - written by Chastity (aka NuyoRiquena ) contains a great overview of the game and process Legendary Studios has use to create their first Zune game.  Also - she'll do an in person interview with the guys once the GameGirl audience get their questions in! This is certainly a HUGE win for

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/22/new-developments-in-xna-resources.aspx'; Well the big announcement at the X NA Blog this week was the new community games option now available at XBOX Live. Well that and the new redesign and other extra added features of the XNA Creators Club site. It’s pretty interesting that premium members will now be able to create games, submit them for community review and then inclusion in XBOX Live Marketplace. But for me the best part was the

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/05/14/getting-started-tutorials-for-zune-game-development.aspx'; Well it hasn’t taken long for more people to jump on the XNA 3.0 Community Technical Preview that was announced last week . Sam Stoke s has a blog post showing the step by step that one needs to take to get the software installed and ready to run. He’s got a lot of screen captures to really make it clear what is going on. Dan Water s who has cranked out a number of previous helpful