XNA Team Blog

Introducing Xbox LIVE Community Games

You’ve played Xbox 360 games with the millions of gamers on Xbox LIVE. You’ve chatted, shared, and dominated in games of all kinds. But what if those millions could be playing your game?

Better still – what if you were getting paid for it?

Starting holiday 08, Xbox LIVE Community Games is your ticket to fame – and possibly fortune as millions of Xbox LIVE users now have the opportunity to view, buy, and play games that you create.

How it Works

The setup? Simple. The payments? Cash.

As a Premium member in the XNA Creators Club, you’ll be able to submit any complete Xbox 360 game you’ve created in XNA Game Studio to the Creators Club community at http://creators.xna.com, for peer review. Other Premium Creators will check to make sure your game is safe to play. If it is, you’ll set a price point – between 200 and 800 Points – that people will pay to download your game.

Once the game is reviewed and the price point set, you’re done. The game is listed on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, and you’ll get a check every quarter, for up to 70% of the game’s total revenue in your own currency. Depending on your game’s success, you may even have your game advertised on Xbox 360 and other Microsoft online properties.

Just imagine - your game in the hands of millions of Xbox 360 gamers around the world: that’s the power of Community Games.

How to Get Started

While the official launch of Xbox LIVE Community Games won’t be until later this year, you can start working on that great game right now with XNA Game Studio and the XNA Creators Club Online community!

First, download XNA Game Studio, the free game development tool from Microsoft. It’s free and works with Visual Studio or Visual C# Express Edition. If you’ve never made a game before, the XNA Creators Club website has tons of samples, tutorials, even whole video guides to game creation. Jump right in and start coding your dream game!

Next, join the XNA Creator’s Club at http://creators.xna.com. It’s a community of game creators just like you. If you’re going to develop games for Xbox 360 and want to sell your game on Xbox LIVE Community Games, you’ll need a Premium membership. It’s just $99 per year or $49 for four months.

Finally, submit your finished game to the XNA Creators Club and watch the money roll in!

Questions?

If you’ve got a question about Community Games, XNA Game Studio, and all of the details in between, please read the handy FAQ to get your answers.

Congratulations Torpex Games!

Michael Klucher
Program Manager - XNA Game Studio

On behalf of all the XNA team, we'd like to extend our congratulations to our friends at Torpex Games for shipping Schizoid today on Xbox LIVE Arcade! Here is some information about Schizoid.

Cooperative gameplay is redefined in the fast-paced and unique Schizoid! Control red and blue ships, ramming them into enemies of the same color to destroy them. But be careful, because if you hit the opposite color, you will be destroyed. Quick thinking and quicker reflexes help you seize victory, but sharp teamwork provides the best chance of earning gold medals along the way. Schizoid offers more than 120 levels of challenge, playable in either single-player or co-op mode, plus the brain-melting Uberschizoid hardcore mode, in which one player controls both ships!

Schizoid also is the first game to be released commercially on the Xbox 360 that was built completely using XNA Game Studio! It looks like their creativity hasn't gone unnoticed, as Penny Arcade has bestowed Schizoid as one of the PAX 10 winners for gameplay and "fun factor"!

Again, our congratulations to the Torpex Games team on their launch. Give it a try today on Xbox LIVE Arcade!

2D Game Tutorial Now Available!

The XNA team is pleased to announce the release of the 2D Game Creation video tutorial. Over 2 hours of in-depth video tutorials are now available for all creators to view. Each video is available at a resolution of 800x600 ensuring you can actually read the code ;-)

• In this 2D tutorial you will learn about:
• XNA Game Studio project creation
• Adding art assets to a project
• Displaying background art
• Sprites
• Simple collision techniques
• Scoring
• Font usage
• Keyboard and Gamepad input
• Basic C# programming within the XNA Framework

Get going at the Getting Started page!

Robot Game Available For Download!

The XNA Team is excited to announce the release of the mini game, Robot Game.

Robot Game was developed by Zepetto, a South Korean game development company. Previously released titles include Vulcanus and several games for mobile platforms.

Robot Game is a three-dimensional robot combat game that demonstrates the following components:

• Advanced graphics using shaders and post-processing effects
• Advanced particle system
• Collision detection, 3D positional sound, input, and screens management
• Single-player mode and split-screen two-player versus mode
• Customizable game elements, such as robots, weapons, and items

Further details, including screenshots and a video are available on the Robot Game details page.

“Robot Game” to be released this Friday!

The XNA Team is excited to announce details about the upcoming release of the mini game, Robot Game. Robot Game was developed by Zepetto, a South Korean game development company. Previously released titles include Vulcanus for the PSP and several games for mobile platforms.

Robot Game is a three-dimensional robot combat game that demonstrates the following components:

• Advanced graphics using shaders and post-processing effects Advanced particle system
  
• Collision detection, 3D positional sound, input, and screens management
  
• Single-player mode and split-screen two-player versus mode
  
• Customizable game elements, such as robots, weapons, and items

It will be available for all XNA Creators Club Premium Members to download on Friday 6/27/2008 at 12pm PST. The project includes all source and art assets which you are free to use as the basis for your own XNA Game Studio game projects.

Further details, including additional screenshots and a video are available at the Creators Club Online web site (http://creators.xna.com/en-us/minigame/robotgame and http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/13265.aspx).

Role-Playing Game Tutorial #2 Now Available

The second tutorial for the new Role-Playing Game starter kit is now available.  This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to re-use the tile-based engine featured in the starter kit in your own game.  For more information, check out the Role-Playing Game starter kit page, and also check out the first tutorial on adding a quest to the game.

• Role-Playing Game Starter Kit
• Role-Playing Game Tutorial #1:  Adding a Quest
• Role-Playing Game Tutorial #2:  Re-using the Tile Engine

You can discuss this new tutorial in this thread in our forums.

XNA Creators Club Site Updated

Today, the XNA Creators Club Online web site has been updated, exposing new features and responding to the feedback from the community based on our release in May. Visit our news item to find out the complete list of feature updates.

Don't forget that you can submit a issue report for the XNA Creators Club Online web site through Microsoft Connect.

Creators Club Online Game On Sweepstakes

Michael Klucher
Program Manager - XNA Game Studio

For those of you who might not have seen this yet here's some great info about our new Creators Club Online Game On Sweepstakes.

In the Game On Sweepstakes you can earn entries into the sweepstakes by reviewing and/or submitting a game.  After you enter the Sweepstakes and anytime you return and login to http://creators.xna.com/ during the Promotion Period, you will be invited to review a video game or submit a unique, custom designed video game. For each game you review, you will receive one additional entry into the Sweepstakes and for each game you submit, you will receive one additional entry into the Sweepstakes, up to a total of fifteen additional entries per day during the Promotion Period.

For more information log on to creators.xna.com

Announcing: Dream-Build-Play 2008

The XNA team is proud to announce Dream-Build-Play 2008, a global competition to see who can create the best game for the Xbox 360 using XNA Game Studio 2.0.  This year’s participants will be competing for $75,000 in prizes and the bragging rights to say their game was the best. In addition, one of the top ten finalists will have a chance at an Xbox LIVE publishing contract.

Prizes:

• 1^st            $40,000
• 2^nd           $20,000
• 3^rd            $10,000
• 4^th            $5,000

Last year’s Dream-Build-Play was an outstanding success as we extended the four top entries opportunities to sign Xbox LIVE Arcade publishing agreements.  We will begin to see those winning games released later this year on Xbox LIVE Arcade. 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. For more information and your chance to create the next great hit log on to www.dreambuildplay.com.

Calling All Games REDUX!

Dave Mitchell
Product Unit Manager - XNA Community Team

With the launch of our Community Games on Xbox LIVE (beta), I’d like to issue a renewed call for our entire Creator community to submit their games written using XNA Game Studio 2.0 for distribution over Xbox LIVE.  The newly launched site is in beta and we’re still looking at the official release later this holiday.  There is no better time than now to take the system for a test drive.  We have several different roles for all of our XNA Creators Club Premium members:

- Create & Submit:  Create your dream games or something wacky just for fun using XNA Game Studio 2.0

- Peer Review:  Check out and review games submitted by your peers and help the community overall to create and share the best games possible

- Play:  XNA Creators Club Premium members in the USA can also download and play the games directly from Xbox LIVE Marketplace after games successfully pass Peer Review

So whether you have a game and want to share it, simply enjoy reviewing games that others are creating and submitting or just want to play all the amazing games created by your peers – there’s more than enough for all our Creators to do!  Over 20 games have already made their way to Xbox LIVE Marketplace and more are on their way! 

Announcing: Community Games on Xbox LIVE Beta

David "LetsKillDave" Weller

Program Manager - XNA Community

Today, we delivered on the promise we made at GDC to democratize game development with the launch of the newly designed XNA Creators Club Online Web site and the highly anticipated beta of Community Games on Xbox LIVE. When we announced this new service at GDC 2008, it was met with great excitement around the world. Now we’re pleased to offer you an opportunity to interact with this new site and test out the distribution pipeline to Xbox LIVE!  If you’re a already a  premium member, you will be able to join us in the Community Games on Xbox LIVE Beta immediately, where you can submit your games and review others games, and enjoy playing  them on Xbox LIVE! If you are not a member, sign up today and get involved in making game development history.

We’re extremely excited about what we have to offer – this effort represents, quite literally, several developer-years of work, and we’re proud to show it off! 

Here are a few cool things we encourage you to check out:

1)      The Quick Start Guide will take you on a tour of all the features of the new site plus a guided tour of how the community games distribution pipeline works.

2)      The new Education Content Catalog lets you find content quickly by type or development area

3)      The new Role Playing Game Starter Kit – sure to stimulate your need for creating your own “old school” RPG-style game

4)      The new Community Spotlight area, featuring interviews and articles from amazing community contributors (and sometimes a “celebrity interview”)

We encourage you, no matter what your game development expertise, to visit the new XNA Creators Club Online Web site, at http://creators.xna.com, to see the new changes for yourself!

For premium members, we strongly encourage you to submit and review games of all types during the Beta. Our goal is to give the community the ability to fully test the functionality of these new features so that we can give you the best experience possible at the time of our final release. 

P.S. – Don’t forget to read the welcome note from our Community Team leader, Dave Mitchell!

New XNA Creators Club Online web site coming soon!

David "LetsKillDave" Weller

Program Manager - XNA Community

Next week, the XNA Creators Club Online site will be shut down for a short time in preparation for the launch of our new site featuring the Community Games on Xbox LIVE Beta. We’re excited about the new design and functionality of the improved XNA Creators Club Online web site, and we eagerly look forward to your return!  In the meantime, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause during the outage

Announcing: XNA Game Studio 3.0 Community Technical Preview (CTP)

Channel 9 Video - Michael Klucher discusses developing games for the Zune

David "LetsKillDave" Weller

Program Manager - XNA Community

We invite you to view this sneak peek video on Zune development with XNA Game Studio, featuring our own XNA Game Studio Program Manager, Michael Klucher.  In this video, Michael describes some of the history and challenges the XNA Game Studio team faced when implementing support for the Zune platform, plus demonstrates how to build and deploy a game on the Zune.  If you’re passionate about the future of mobile gaming, you’ll consider this to be a well-spent 17 minutes!

GDC 2008 Presenations are now available!

David "LetsKillDave" Weller

Program Manager - XNA Community

We pleased to announce the availability of the Microsoft Developer Day GDC presentations on MSDN, effective immediately!  Our thanks goes out to the GDC speakers, who put in a great deal of time and effort to create and present these decks.

Here’s the complete list of decks, which can also be found on the XNA Presentations page on MSDN:

XAudio2 - Audio Building Blocks For The Future

Speaker: Brian Schmidt

Game audio has evolved well beyond simple wave-file playback with 3D positioning. Now, a great sounding game needs programmable DSP effects, submixing of sounds, surround processing and more. XAudio 2 is the new low-level audio API for Xbox 360 and Windows, providing these features and more through a highly efficient software mixing engine. XAudio 2 supplants DirectSound on Windows and XAudio on Xbox 360, allowing you to write code that is easily portable between Xbox 360 and Windows. This session will cover the XAudio 2 architecture and XAudio 2 features. It will also show programming examples for solutions such as occlusion and environmental modeling, how 3D is implemented and its use of data compression.

XDK Update GDC 2008

Speaker: Cameron Egbert

Microsoft continues to add exciting new features and tools to the Xbox 360 XDK.  Recent additions include XAudio2, XMCore, APIMon, PGOLite, and /Analyze support.  This presentation provides an overview of these new features and discusses best practices for how they can be utilized to create great games.

XNA Game Studio 2.0 for Xbox LIVE Arcade

Speaker: Mitch Walker

One question resounds as more and more developers discover the productivity gains from XNA Game Studio. How do you make money from the games you create? This talk offers a sneak peek into the XNA Arcade Extensions to Game Studio 2.0 along with details of how professional developers can take advantage of XNA Game Studio to produce commercial games.

Understanding XNA Framework Performance

Speaker: Shawn Hargreaves

This talk is for programmers who want to understand how the XNA Framework works on Xbox 360, and the implications for writing high-performance code. The talk explains when and why the framework transitions between the Xbox user and supervisor modes, and why should you care. The talk also presents best practices for writing efficient graphics and math code, how to use multiple cores to parallelize your game, and which XNA Framework APIs can be called while doing so. Finally, the talk demonstrates what tools are available for investigating performance on Xbox 360, and how Windows tools can help you understand Xbox 360 performance issues.

The Evolving Windows Gaming Platform

Speaker: Chuck Walbourn

The Windows platform must keep with the times, and gamers drive the bleeding edge of the technology curve. This presentation covers recent developments in the Windows platform for games with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Direct3D 10.1, and the on-going 64-bit technology transition as well as strategies for coping with and moving beyond the long-standing 2 GB memory barrier.

Performance Tools Update

Speaker: David Cook

Everybody’s favorite profiler Pix has gotten even better. Hear about the new additions, including continuous capture, Dr. Pix warnings, optical drive monitoring, and more. Learn how to use Pix to investigate performance spikes, detect anomalies, and improve load times.

Networking with the XNA Framework

Speaker: Shawn Hargreaves

Playing games by yourself can be fun, but it’s far better when you can play with others, whether cooperatively or head-to-head. Creating multiplayer games using XNA Game Studio, however, requires networking support in the XNA Framework for both Windows and Xbox 360. And that support simply wasn’t there…until now! With the release of XNA Game Studio 2.0, we have augmented the XNA Framework to include support for networked games. Come learn about networking in the XNA Framework, what is supported and what’s not, and how you can enable multiplayer support in your games.

Getting More From Multicore

Speaker: Ian Lewis

Multithreaded programming doesn’t seem as hard as it used to, but it’s still challenging to wring the greatest amount of performance out of multiple processor cores. From experience with multiple game developers and Microsoft’s internal SDK teams, we’ve found a set of best practices to follow, as well as some common techniques that are best avoided. We’ll present tips and tricks for getting the most out of multiple processors on Windows and Xbox 360, and discuss new Microsoft technologies that can help make high-performance multicore programming a little easier.

Games for Windows - LIVE Just the Facts

Speaker: Ray Thompson

With Games for Windows – LIVE, Microsoft is extending the Xbox LIVE® gaming and entertainment network to Windows. Learn about the features and find out the basics. This presentation will help you understand what it takes to ship a basic single-player game, and also help you understand the differences between the platforms as you move a game from Xbox 360 to Windows.

CLR Performance

Speaker: Frank Savage

This talk is for those who want to understand the inescapable performance consequences of the managed programming method: the things you cannot avoid and the things you can. Comparing and contrasting the consequences for the .NET Compact Framework and the classic .NET runtime, the talk explains the reasons for these overheads, the benefits they provide, and what practices minimize the associated costs. Additionally, we discuss some commonly occurring costs, such as boxing, that aren’t inherent to all managed code, and we offer some tips for minimizing those costs.

D3D10 - Getting from 0 to 60 Hz

Speaker: Kevin Gee

Learn about performance tools and best practices for driving the DirectX 10 renderer in your game from XNA Developer Connection's experiences in the trenches. This talk identifies common issues from developing high-end graphics experiences on Windows Vista using DX10 and outlines approaches to mitigate those issues.

Extending the Content Pipeline

Speaker: Frank Savage

The XNA Framework Content Pipeline allows developers to use Visual Studio to build their art into resources for use with the XNA Framework and XNA Game Studio. This talk covers how to create new importers and processors using C# to extend the functionality of the Content Pipeline as well as how to debug these importers and processors using XNA Game Studio. We go in-depth into the creation of the code for the importers and processors and do hands-on debugging of the resulting processor and importer to give the audience a clear idea of how to work with and extend the Content Pipeline.

Advanced Debugging with Managed Code

Speaker: Matthew Picoccio

XNA Game Studio offers a robust debugging experience that can greatly enhance a developer’s ability to investigate a game as it runs. Developers of managed games have many debugging techniques at their disposal, but not all of them are self-evident. This talk covers advanced debugging techniques useful to game developers, including demonstrations of powerful IDE debugger features and other tools provided by Microsoft.