XNA GS at GDC!
Some of you may not know that Game Developers Conference is happening now, and we are super excited about it! The XNA GS team is making two very very cool announcements: Zune is a new platform for game development and the ability to publish your games online for consumption through Xbox Live marketplace! This is so exciting, I am lost for words! Let me try though. Let me walk you through the two major announcements.
Zune
We have been working for a while on getting the Zune music player as a supported platform for XNA GS. Actually, if you remember from reading Yuichi Ito’s interview, this is the “secret” stuff he’s been working on for a while now! This will allow you guys to write your own games using the familiar XNA Framework and run them on a Zune device. All Zune devices are supported, old and new. You can read the FAQ that was posted in the forums about it. But I can tell you that I have used it (got it working on my Zune) and it is awesome! I was truly impressed by the work that was done so far, and it’s not even done!
Community Publishing
Ah… you’ve been asking for this since we released the first betas of XNA GS: “Can we publish our games on Xbox Live???”. Finally we have an answer that is good! Soon you will be able to upload a game you’ve written to the new http://creators.xna.com site (still in development but already looks HAWT!) and once it’s “approved”, people are going to be able to download it on their Xboxes through Xbox Live market place! So start making those games!!!! There are a lot of details regarding the publishing system that I am sure we’ll talk about more in the coming months. But trust me, this is very cool stuff. The guys working on this feature are incredibly cool and good at what they do.
XNA Games for download!
Yep, for a short while you are able to download 8 games that were built by XNA GS on Live Marketplace! Samurai Dishwasher is one of them! Go check out what people have done using XNA GS and have fun playing them. They are really cool games.
Now go have fun and I’ll get back to getting my lazy butt to continue my game series. I got some nice posts coming up… I just need to write them ;)
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February 21st, 2008 at 9:08 am
This has me pretty excited Naz! I have a couple questions. I assume that there will be some form of barrier to entry to get a game up on Xbox live. Could you maybe describe what that is? I assume that developers will need to be a Creators Club member to publish still, so that is a $100/year barrier are there more?
Also, what are the options for self distributing? Say I have a small game I wish to distribute to my friends. Could I upload the files to my website, have them download it and then transfer via USB stick to their Xboxes?
February 21st, 2008 at 11:48 am
Hey :) Yeah! Exciting stuff isn’t it? I am not sure about your first question so I won’t give an answer that might be quoted somewhere else (then turn out to be wrong). They guys working on this at the team explicitly did not share any plans that included money.
As for distributing your game to friends, you will still need them to have CC membership in order to be able to deploy the game on their Xbox from a PC. That experience is not changing by the coming of community publishing. You can however upload your game to the publishing site, let it go through the review process and then it will be up on market place for them to download.
Like I said, there still are details to be shared about this. I am not being secretive or any of that crap, I really honestly don’t know haha. But I do share any feedback I get from you guys directly with the guys working on this stuff.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Naz,
Thanks for the response. I totally understand the not being involved with the money side of things. Thanks for the clarification.
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:17 am
Yes, this was very exciting news. I cannot wait to free up some time from college studies to better my skills in XNA. Hopefully nazeeh will have some more tutorials available soon to help further everyones learning!!