Posts Tagged Microsoft
The XNA to indie transition.
Posted by The Management in miscellaneous on July 24, 2009
Details on Xbox Live’s XNA section transforming itself into an “indie” one have finally arrived.
The name change was announced a while ago and it seems like a fairly reasonable move. The word “indie” carries a lot more cachet than “XNA,” and “Indie Games” rolls off the tongue much more nicely than “XNA Community Games.” A bunch of nice new features were also announced such as tokens. These digital coupons come in a limited quantity and (presumably) can be sent to anyone you want, at which point (once again, presumably) they’ll be able to download your game for free.
With the oncoming user rankings, this could really improve the service, but I am very disappointed by the new price changes.
I was never big on the concept of price slots, and now they’re being shrunk down. What used to be the 800/400/200 scale is becoming a 400/240/80 one. This might be a result of so many XNA titles being little “trinkets” that resemble the $0.99 entries on iPhone AppStore, but I don’t see a reason to drop the ceiling as a whole. 800 points was not an astronomic number to begin with, and now the highest price that indie developers can charge for their XNA titles is $5. Won’t this simply increase the amount of games of dubious quality and further enlarge the rift between Xbox Live’s Indie and Arcade titles?
Then again maybe that’s the intention. Prices of Arcade games have been steadily going up, while there’ve been rumours of indie developers being shut out from the Arcade section. The lower price points might encourage experimentation, but, in the end, I don’t see them helping XNA games get closer to the overall polish and quality — at least a perceived one — of Arcade titles.
Make games for the Xbox 360 without knowing how to program?
Posted by The Management in miscellaneous on February 20, 2009
Recently I decided to use my free time (hah!) to check out the XNA Game Studio. For those of you not aware, XNA is Microsoft’s outreach program to the homebrew/indie community.
The XNA community portal.
The Game Studio itself is a suite of tools that can be used to make games for Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune. It’s not quite the same as Xbox Live Arcade, but similar in scope. What really surprised me, though, were the XNA tutorial videos. There’s a whole bunch of them, and some even assume that you know nothing about programming.
So how much can you really get from ‘em? Well, the videos take you step by step through various programming concepts and conventions, but eventually you will need to learn how to program. Or at least get very good at tweaking others’ code.
Still, this is as good a start as any.
When I began to learn programming — always with the intention of making videogames — I was a bit overwhelmed. There were a lot of languages, all with their own libraries, and all dedicated to particular pieces of hardware. Also, they seemed to universally cater towards tasks that had nothing to do with what I wanted to learn.
Eventually, though, I decided not to worry too much about the starting point and just dive in. The semantics of programming languages and their APIs vary, but they carry over, and the concepts are 100% portable.
In general, software tends to resemble a clockwork mechanism; a sprawling contraption of numerous interconnected parts. The logic behind each part is never that difficult to grasp, but the whole picture can be a bit daunting. Tweak and slowly change around the parts, though, and you’ll start learning how the whole thing functions. The XNA tutorial videos encourage this, and even point out places where you might want to experiment and where you should go to learn more. There are also plenty of videogame specific tutorials, and some even include entire “construction kits” (small-scale game engines that contain numerous pieces of functionality).
Microsoft seems to have put in a great deal of effort into the XNA community, and it’s definitely worth checking out. And who knows, if you develop something for it, you might also end up selling it to millions of Xbox 360 owners.
About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I work as a videogame design consultant. I'm also the creative lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and write a lot of it down too, so I figured why not make it public?
If you'd like to contact me, drop me a line at themanagement@significant-bits.com.