I will try and keep this brief.

When I first started game development, as in started coding with proper code, loops, conditional statements, objects, I started with a system not famed for it’s 1st party development support, in fact, there is none to speak of, I had to resort to coding through illegal means, hacked firmware and less than endorsed hardware all held together with a SDK that was wrote by a man (albeit a genius) in his bedroom with nothing but a knowledge of ARM and a half arsed emulator devoid in many features of the hardware it was attempting to emulate. But I got on with this SDK, it had some great time saving functions but all in all it was C, it had no Intellisense and was void of all but the most basic OO principals, but I used it to release some pretty shaky games and apps to the underground hombrew scene, which was a very limited audience indeed. But it was good.

And then Microsoft game along and released XNA and made video game development great!

I actually started with the XNA SDK before Microsoft made the announcment about the community games so the news was even more suprising to me, after all XNA will let a developer do anything, and that includes possible suspect material of course there are procedures to stop any explicit or copyright infringing material getting into the communitys hands, although these procedures are fully peer orientated, you submit your game to other users who vet it for content, all XNA community members can review a game during the approval process, people who have review more games hold more weight behind the decisio, mainly to speed up the process by having trusted sources of review. One thing Microsoft notes on the community games approval faq is that community members should never base a decision on whether a game is approved on the game concept, mainly whether the game is percieved to be fun or not, which is great news as I hope to see some really quirky ideas hopping onto the Xbox360.

But this whole concept would be nought if the environment was poor, but it’s not, it’s amazing. Microsoft didn’t decide to give away some half arsed propietry drag and drop beginners kit worth shit, they gave us full fat c# with all the features available to regular Xbox360 developers (the only feature XNA developers can’t utilise is the Xbox Camera) so as long as you can dream it, and you have the technical knowledge, you can pull it off, but to help there are some great tutorials out there geared to getting the best from the 360 hardware and the effects it can pull off.

I would reccommend taking a look at blue rose games for some excellent 101 tutorials, xnadevelopment also features some very good beginner tutorials, with some great code standards thrown in for good measure (the wizard tutorial is particuarly brilliant) and possibly the best site for advanced tutorials is ziggyware which features tutorials such as 2d refraction, bloom/blur post processing and even deformable levels (orry, I’m looking at you). And of course we have the official XNA tutorials from Microsof. Check them out, theres some real gems in there.

So, what am I doing with XNA? That’s kind of a secret, but in short, it’s a platformer, I hope to be able to show something off during Easter, but we’ll see, won’t we?

Anyway, I fancy doing some development. Laters.

Andy