It’s time once more for the Game Developer Conference (GDC) and we’ve got a lot of exciting news to share!
Michael Klucher
Program Manager – XNA Community Game Platform Team
Last year at GDC, we had the opportunity to announce the XNA Framework and show a few technical demos running on our alpha environment on an Xbox 360 development kit. We’ve made a lot of progress since then and even managed to ship our version 1.0 product this past December. This year at GDC, we’ve got even more things going on including several great announcements around XNA Game Studio Express.
The XNA Creators Club Online community site is open for business!
Head on over to http://creators.xna.com and register for the XNA Creators Club Online community. You’ll find some great content such as:
- A brand new starter kit! (Marblets)
- Several samples including a skinning (animation) sample using the XNA Framework Content Pipeline!
- Downloadable sample games.
New developer forums. - Video tutorials.
- Much, much, more!
Join up now, and start contributing! XNA Creators Club members on the Xbox 360 will soon be flagged as Premium members and have access to even more benefits as you’ll find further down. Don’t have an XNA Creators Club for Xbox 360 membership yet? No problem, you can still join the Creators community and receive great free benefits as well as participate in the forums. I hope to see you there!
Dream-Build-Play’s main competition has gone live.
Fame, fortune and a chance at global envy await you in our Dream-Build-Play competition. The grand prize is a $10,000, an awesome Alienware PC with a smokin’ fast AMD FX processor and ATI graphics card, 3D modeling software, Xbox 360, XNA Creators Club subscription tokens and an amazingly cool Xbox Live Arcade publishing contract for your chance to get your game published on Xbox Live Arcade. Do you have what it takes to win all that and more? Then get started on making your dream game using XNA Game Studio Express and head on over to http://www.dreambuildplay.com to enter it into the contest.
New partnerships and exclusive benefits for XNA Creators Club Premium members.
We’ve teamed up with several partners to provide special benefits for those of you with memberships to the XNA Creators Club. Straight from our press release, here’s what our XNA Creators Club Premium members will start to enjoy starting as early as May.
- GarageGames Torque X Engine. Members of the XNA Creators Club will receive a license to the Torque X Engine, including the Torque Game Builder toolset for Torque X, as a free membership benefit.
- SOFTIMAGE|XSI. Softimage is developing new 3-D solutions based on its XSI 3-D software for game creators and exclusive content for members of the XNA Creators Club to support the XNA platform scheduled for release later this year.
- Allegorithmic ProFX. In addition to the free MapZone 2-D texture editor released today, Allegorithmic is developing an enhanced version exclusively for XNA Creators Club members that will offer support for procedural textures, additional texture libraries and custom content processors for use with the XNA Framework Content Pipeline. The enhanced version of MapZone will be made available to active members of the XNA Creators Club at no additional cost and will be available later this year.
