Developing for the Xbox 360 using XNA

by Ben Coley, Developer Evangelist Intern

If you’re like me and do own an Xbox 360, you’ll already know that there are some simply fantastic games created for the Xbox. (If you didn’t know that, you do now!)

Ever wondered if it would be possible to create and deploy your own games to the Xbox 360? Microsoft has very kindly given us this opportunity with a piece of software known as “XNA Game Studio Express”. Basically, you’ll install Visual C# Express Edition (a free edition of it’s bigger brother, Visual C# 2005), then you’ll install an add-on for it called XNA Game Studio Express.

This will give you a bunch of sample games that you can deploy to both Windows and the 360, so you finally have the ability to test your creativity.

Okay, so first things first, you’ll need to head over to https://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/ to get Visual C# Express Edition. (Note: make sure you install the SP1 Update!)

Next, you’ll need to go to https://msdn.microsoft.com/xna/ to get XNA Game Studio Express.

Once you have both of these, you’re ready to begin developing games for the Windows(TM) platform. So that’s great – now I can develop Windows games. What about the Xbox 360..?

To successfully deploy games to your Xbox 360, you’ll need to grab yourself a “Creators Club” membership. Go to https://creators.xna.com/subscribers/CreatorsClubPremium.aspx to find out how to become a member – the site shows the easy steps you take on your Xbox 360 to set up your account.

Once you have an account, you can start deploying games right away! Simply launch the XNA Creators Club application on your Xbox 360, and start XNA Game Studio Express on your PC. (I’m assuming you’ve networked both of these and have an internet connection!)

In XNA Game Studio Express, load one of the Starter Kits (such as Spacewar), make sure you select Xbox 360 as your deployment environment, then on your 360 select “Connect to PC”. Once you’ve done all this, you can start debugging your application by hitting F5. You’ll notice that the Xbox 360 starts showing names of the files that your computer is deploying – this is normal. Once all the necessary files are deployed, the Xbox will start to run your game.

There you have it! You are now well on your way to creating really cool Xbox 360 games (of course, this is skill dependant!!). For a really cool example of what you can achieve using XNA, I strongly recommend downloading and deploying the XNA Racer game.