I had it pointed out to me that my 2nd XNA book is available for pre-order on Amazon. It’s not even up on the publisher’s “Coming Soon” section. I wonder how they got the info? It’s not going to be available this month though. I’m finishing up some tech edits now. Hopefully there’s not much in the way of content edits.

Go me! I got the email from MS on the 1st notifying me that I’d been selected again as a Microsoft MVP in the XNA area. I guess all that posting in the Creators Club forums paid off. That means a trip in March to the MVP Summit to talk to all the great people on the XNA team (and other areas), some great parties (hopefully!) and maybe some free stuff (that’s not why I love being an MVP, honest – but it doesn’t hurt! :D)

I didn’t make a resolution to post more to this blog, but I’m really going to try. Now that the first draft of my 2nd XNA book is done, my schedule should be a little clearer to actually do stuff to talk about here, maybe even a game for Xbox Live Community Games (any artists out there that would like to help someone that makes normal programmer art look good?).

If you are into Zune games in the slightest, you’ve probably heard about this game. If not you owe it to yourself to check this out immediately. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

OK, if you’re like me you’ve probably just spent at least a half hour playing this, and this is just a preview! I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this. Let the developer know what you think by posting a reply to the thread.

Just found out about this article from a post in the Creators Club Forums. There’s a lot of good info in there if you’re looking to build games for the Xbox 360 using XNA Game Studio.

The (in)famous ZMan has a video of the first 3 games that have made it to Xbox Live Community Games. Head over there to check it out. I somehow managed to get online during the show. :)

It seems everyone is trying fast and furiously to get their games approved for the roll out on the 19th. I’ve reviewed a couple of really cool games and a couple that weren’t so cool, but I think there will be plenty of great games to download by when the NXE hits. I can’t wait to play everyone online.

Well, assuming you’re in on the NXE beta, that is. :) The (in)famous ZMan posted a screenshot of his 360 running the NXE beta with the first 2 games that went through the peer review process and are now ready to be bought. Check out his flickr set here.

It seems there’s a lot of confusion about submitting your games on the XNA Creators Club website. Since the Peer Review piece is what’s been stressed so much over the past couple of months maybe it’s no wonder there’s been some problems but hopefully this post and others like it will help spread the word.

There’s two separate processes for submitting your game, Play Test and Peer Review. The former is probably what most people should be using. The Play Test submission is meant for games that aren’t complete and ready to be put on Xbox Live Community Games. If you know there are bugs in your game that you want people to help test or if you aren’t sure that your game will work properly (for example, the issue with having a memory unit and hard drive and having to pick between them for storing game info) or if you just want to get feedback on a game, the Play Test type of submission is what you want. You should not be using the Peer Review type of submission unless your game is complete, as bug free as you can make it, and ready to be put on XBLCG.

So, how do you specify which to use? First, I’d recommend reading the page on submitting your game. Here’s a screenshot of the final step in submitting your game. Note at the bottom Playtest is selected by default. Unless you’re sure your game is ready to be purchased and played by the community this is the option you want.

If you want your game to be looked at, ensure you use the proper option, otherwise you’ll end up getting responses in the forum thread that’s created when you submit your game telling you your game isn’t ready and to resubmit it under Play Test. More than likely it’s not going to be approved anyway and you’ll just end up having wasted days or weeks. The community is primed and ready to play all the games that can be submitted, but you need to make sure it’s something worth playing. Doing so benefits you and the community.

Kathleen Sander, the XNA Community Manager, submitted to grilling by Major Nelson about the upcoming Xbox Live Community Games launch and you can see the results here. Well, ok, so it wasn’t really a grilling. Anyway, check it out.

If you’ve browsed through the forums over at Zune Boards you’ve probably seen this already, but I figured I’d post here about it as well (just because I’ve been slacking on posting here ;D).  You can check out the description in the forum post here or just download the game from here. It’s a zipped .ccgame package and you’ll need to have the 3.0 beta of XNA Game Studio installed to deploy it to your Zune. Here’s some screenshots:

October 30th, to be exact. That should give everyone plenty of time to get their games ready for the launch of the New Xbox Experience on November 19th. Read about it on the Creators Club site.

No, this isn’t one of those “buy a couple of things from a bunch of offers” scams. This is an actual chance to win an Xbox 360 Elite as well as a one year subscription to the XNA Creators Club so you can put XNA GS games on that new Xbox 360. Of course, there is a catch – you have to write a tutorial about XNA Game Studio for Ziggyware. Check out the details here.

Found this video on a post on Michael Klucher’s blog. This looks pretty good for a PC game so the fact that it’s running on the Zune is very cool.

I'm recovering from back surgery that I had just over a week ago, so I figured I'm entitled. :)

What I'm doing:

• Working on my second XNA book - this one on RPG development. I'm been going over the proof for the first one. Hopefully it'll be out early next month.
• Trying out the new Creators Club site. If you haven't been there in a while, check it out. If you're a CC Premium member, there's over a dozen XNA games available on the Xbox 360 for you to try out. Woot!
• Writing a design doc for a game I've been trying to get done. Hopefully I'll get the game done in time for the next Dream-Build-Play contest.
• Trying out games on the Zune. Woot again!
• I uploaded a couple of videos to YouTube of me (and Ziggy) doing some Rock Band that Z-Man was kind enough to take at the 2008 MVP Summit.
• Other (boring to you guys, and sometimes me) non-games development related stuff. :(

Yes, I've been slacking off again, but for the past week I had an excuse (kinda). I was at the Microsoft MVP Summit learning about all the cool stuff that's coming and playing with my new Zune. :)

All kinds of silly (and not so silly) ideas were tossed around by the XNA MVPs and I threw together one of them - Endurance. It's a silly little game, but knowing the competitive nature of gamers, someone will keep it going for wayyyyy too long. :D

Our friend George was the originator of this one, so go blame him if you'd like.

Channel 10 has been giving XNA GS some love for a while now. Laura Foy made another post last night that you can check out here. Hit the XNA tag on the post for more good stuff.

The bad news would be for those 2 or 3 people that were following my RPG series and waiting for the next part. I'm afraid that series is going to be discontinued. :(  The good news is that I'm starting a much larger version of it. More info will follow soon. :)

I've been fiddling around with this RPG and associated book/text since my VB 6 days. It's great that it'll finally see the light of day.

Check out the latest issue (April 08) of the Official Xbox Magazine. On page 54 you'll notice that The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai game created with XNA Game Studio is included in the list of upcoming Xbox Live Arcade games. Very nice. Another known commercial  XNA GS game, Schizoid, is also included on that page. It looks like XNA Game Studio is set to take over the gaming industry, especially come the end of this year when we'll have the ability to publish XNA GS games to Live Arcade. :)

Or a thousand HP in this case:

OK, so this is a little old, but it's still freakin' cool! The movie is looking great so far. It might actually live up to us fanboy's expectations. :)

So you didn't get to attend this year's GDC (like me :( ) and you missed all the goodness of the GDC Expo. We'll Dave Mark has come to your rescue. Here's his "Expo in 10 minutes" post with accompanying video.