Machaira's Space: XNA

Great XNA Zune game video

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:47:08 GMT

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.

Back from the MVP Summit

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:44:03 GMT

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.

XNA Game Studio Quickie

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:15:05 GMT

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.

Some bad news and some good news

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:56:27 GMT

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.

Dishwasher makes OXM

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:28:32 GMT

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. :)

XNA Game Distribution Info

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:58:08 GMT

Gamasutra has posted a nice article detailing the steps for the up-coming XNA community game distribution model.

Zune XNA Game Video

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:45:23 GMT

Unfortunately, I can't embed from MSN Video (at least I couldn't figure it out in the 2 minutes I spent trying), but you can check it out here.

MS GDC Keynote Information Revealed

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:32:50 GMT

I've posted this to a couple of places already, but this post is probably a good one to link to.

/me gets back to work on a game for the beta

edit: Gamasutra now has their review up

XNA Live Arcade extensions unveiled

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:42:12 GMT

From this article, looks like MS revealed something before the keynote tomorrow. Pro developers that aren't doing cutting edge games shouldn't have many reasons left not to adopt XNA Game Studio now.

Dream-Build-Play Warm-up Winners Announced

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:24:16 GMT

Five winners were announced yesterday. Congrats to all. I haven't had a chance to play any of the games, but I'm hoping to find some time. Now we just have to wait for the main competition to start. :)

Hotkey Bar Component

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:16:13 GMT

A post on the Creators Club forums got me thinking about how a typical MMORPG hotkey bar interface could be done that would use the 360 Gamepad controller. I took a couple minutes to whip up a component with one idea on how to do this. Grab it from the Downloads page on my site and let me know what you think by posting in my forums.

XNA 2.0 and VS 2008

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:04:48 GMT

Yup, although it's not officially supported, you can use them together. Check out Ultrahead's great article and then be sure to vote for it.

XNA Game Installer

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:38:30 GMT

Cygon has come up with an installer template for Wix for your XNA games. Looks like it could be the answer many people are looking for. Check it out over at CodePlex.

Get Ready For Round 2.0

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:45:52 GMT

Nuff said

TorqueX 3D Open Beta Available

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:22:26 GMT

Garage Games has released an open beta for the 3D piece of their TorqueX engine. If you want to do 3D games using XNA, you might want to check it out.

Get it while it's hot :)

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:44:21 GMT

The book I'm co-authoring is finally on Wordware's coming soon list:

http://www.wordware.com/computer/coming_soon.shtml

It'll cover the next version of XNA which should be released between now and Christmas. Amazon and the usual suspects should be updated soon with information on the contents.

Go me.

Ghost Arena Gameplay Video

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:45:33 GMT

Finally had time to grab some video of the 2D version of the game that's built in the course of the XNA book I'm working on, Essential XNA Game Programming. There's a couple of issues to fix and the quality obviously isn't great with having to shrink it to a quarter of it's regular size, but you'll get the idea of what it'll be like I guess.

The Collector alpha version released

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:34:13 GMT

Head over to Aztec Games and try out the alpha of The Collector. This has some potential for XNA Live Arcade (whatever form that might take in the future) or a full-blown Live Arcade game. After you've tried it out, head over to the post for the game on the Creators Club forums and let him know what you thought.

Carot Engine released

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 17:51:24 GMT

It looks like one of the developers of the Verge engine has jumped ship to XNA (or at least went off on a vacation cruise), releasing an alpha build of his Carot engine. It appears there's some issues using it as is, which I guess is to be expected of an alpha release. The developer is looking for feedback so head over to the site, check it out and let him know what kind of functionality you'd like to see.

FlatRedBall XNA Engine Released

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:43:07 GMT

The FlatRedBall team has released a new version of their game engine for XNA. Read the blog post here. There are two game templates beside the basic empty game template, a top-down shooter template and a template for a game called Beef Ball.

XNA Xbox 360 Connection Key Bug

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 02:47:43 GMT

Michael Klucher has updated his blog with information on a bug that's been found in the connection key generation for connection your PC with your Xbox 360 for doing XNA Xbox 360 game development. Basically if a key is generated that start with a zero, one, or the letter O, you'll need to regenerate the key before entering it into Game Studio Express.

Read the blog post here.

TorqueX 3D in action

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:23:59 GMT

Found some screenshots of the TorqueX 3D piece over on the GarageGames' Flickr pages. It looks pretty nice in an almost cartoony fashion. Check them out starting here down near the bottom and on the next page.

update: there's also some better images in this thread on the GG forums.

First XNA book screenshot

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 01:39:37 GMT

Just a quick teaser of what you'll be creating early on in the XNA book I'm co-authoring.

Each version of the game is built upon in succeeding chapters until you end up with a full top down shooter. By the end of the book you work in difficulty levels and achievements. I'm pretty excited and hope it will benefit everyone that's getting into Game Studio Express.

Finally, an update!

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:57:00 GMT

Yeah, it's been a while since the last update, but I have an excuse. No, really, I do.

I've been pretty much non-stop on this for the past 2 months or so. It's definitely a challenge. Information should start showing up on the usual suspects (Amazon, etc.) shortly. We're hoping to cover some things that the other current XNA books haven't. Hopefully one or two people will get something out of it.

Stay tuned for more on the trials and tribulations of writing (you guys that haven't done it before can come back in a month and a half ;D ).

XNA Tringo Game Uploaded

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:46:47 GMT

I've put a XNA implementation of the Tringo game up on the Downloads page of my site. Currently it's just a Windows version. I'm working on the 360 version and it should be available in a day or so. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Dream-Build-Play winner in the news

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:50:57 GMT

Looks like one of the winners of the DBP competition has become a minor celebrity. Check out this article on globeandmail.com. I'll be waiting to see some of the winners on Live Arcade.

Pictures from Gamefest 2007 of DBP entries

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:49:24 GMT

ZMan has been kind enough to post some pics of the finalists of the Dream-Build-Play competition running on Xbox 360s at Gamefest 2007.

All of the entries looked very cool. Hopefully we'll see this by the end of the year on Xbox Live Arcade.

XNA Game Studio 2.0 Announced

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 23:28:45 GMT

Mitch Walker went over the new features for XNA GS 2.0 (yes the omission of the E for Express was intentional!) today at the Gamefest conference. A lot of great features are going to be put in to the new version. You can take a look at the XNA Team Blog entry here.

I can't wait to get my hands on this and start making my XNA games networked. I'm watching Shawn Hargreaves create a network game right now on the webcast. Looks like they've made it a piece o' cake to make your name network-aware on both PC and 360.

Dream-Build-Play Winners Announced

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 23:23:34 GMT

No, I wasn't one of them. I chose to work on something that is guaranteed to pay me something.

Chris Satchell stunned people (well, me at least. I can't speak for anyone else) by announcing not 1, not 2, but 4 publishing offers for Xbox Live Arcade. The 4 winners were:

Blazing Birds & The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai (Remix) with a tie for 1st place.

Gravitron Ultra & Yo Ho Kablammo! with a tie for 2nd place.

The other winners can be found on the DPB page here. Kudos to all the winners. I'm looking forward to downloading and playing most of these.

Lots of XNA Stuff

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 14:57:32 GMT

Yeah, I've been slacking on the posts. It's been a busy couple of weeks. One of the reasons for which I'll have to check about talking about. I'm anxious to discuss it though.

A lot is happening on the XNA front:

Dream-Build-Play finalists announced - check them out here. Some truly incredible work there. I'm looking forward to seeing one of these on Xbox Live Arcade. Seeing these makes me glad I didn't try to submit the game I'm working on. While I think it's a pretty fun game, the graphics leave a lot to be desired at this point so I'm sure it wouldn't have made it anyway. It's going to be revamped soon anyway, which I'll talk about next week after the first day of Gamefest (see below)
Gamefest webcast - MS will be webasting the keynote and first six sessions of the XNA Game Studio track on Monday the 13th. You can see the lineup here. There's some fantastic stuff coming up for XNA Game Studio, some of which I got to hear Tuesday as part of a pre-Gamefest MVP briefing. You can expect a flurry of comments and activity after next Monday. :)

XNA and Guildhall deal

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:56:41 GMT

Yeah, this is a little old, but I just found it. From the article on GameDev.Net here:

Microsoft is working with The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University in its newly formed Innovation Laboratory to find ways in which Microsoft XNA tools and technology can help to drive improvements in general computing and game development academic programs as well to research innovative new approaches to game design, development and education for students and established game developers alike.

XNA Live Arcade toolset coming

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:00:33 GMT

From this article:

"In an exclusive interview with Develop, Carbonated Games’ Joshua Howard has revealed that the studio is working with the XNA team to develop a toolset for producing Xbox Live Arcade games."

If you're not already doing game development using XNA, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. Who knows, your next game might end up on Live Arcade!

New XNA Creators Club Member Content

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 18:33:29 GMT

Dave Weller posted over on his blog about the release of Torque X and Torque X Builder for XNA Creators Club subscribers. This is a nice perk for us members as it'll save us $100 if we were to buy it ourselves. I took a look at look it a couple months ago and even then it was a pretty nice tool for getting a game up and running quickly. There was some quirks about it that had to be learned, but I'm hoping for good things. I'll post a review of it as soon as I get it up and running.

Download link

New XNA Samples

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 13:27:34 GMT

Rare has posted a ton of XNA samples. They're pre-refresh so some might need some tweaking and at least one (the font render) might not be as useful as it was before the refresh. They're all still worth taking a look at. You can find the list with download links on the XNA UK User Group page here.

Thanks to Mykre for the post on this.

XNA Technology Demo

Wed, 30 May 2007 17:42:11 GMT

Seems XNA is getting more and more use. Although this video was in an article about surface computing, I happened to hear that the demo uses XNA technology. Very cool stuff that's happening in XNA land.

New XNA Content

Fri, 25 May 2007 03:06:09 GMT

The XNA Team has posted another huge chunk of content on the XNA Creators Club site. Head over there now and take a look. A lot of great stuff that people have been asking for. The team is obviously trying to provided the community with what they want.

XNA Tower Defense

Wed, 09 May 2007 13:17:37 GMT

Anyone that visits GameDev.Net regularly probably saw the thread in Lounge about the Tower Defense game. I played two of the versions that are mentioned in the thread, wasting much coding time. :)

Well, a couple of guys from the #xna channel on IRC (Efnet) got together and whipped up a pretty cool version using Game Studio Express. You can check it out in the thread of the Creators Club forums here.

I've only played it for a couple of minutes and it looks like it will be pretty fun. Give it a try and let the team know what you think. Who knows, it might end up on Live Arcade and you could say "Yeah, I played that back when it was in beta." :)

Hot XNA Book

Tue, 01 May 2007 18:04:06 GMT

Looks like Ben Nitschke's XNA book, Professional XNA Game Programming For Xbox 360 and Windows, is doing pretty well. I got a call from Chris Webb at Wrox (since I was the tech editor on the book) letting me know that it's in the top 600 of all books on Amazon.com (it's at 520 at the time I'm writing this) and in the top 20 of Computer books (16 at this time). Looking at the computer related books ahead of it and considering where it's at having only been available for a couple of weeks, I have a feeling it's going to move quickly up that chart.

I learned a lot about XNA and game programming just doing the tech edit for the book and I think it's a must read for anyone who's doing XNA game development. You'll also want to head over to Ben's site and grab the updated source code for the projects in the book. I believe the code will be mirrored on the book's page on the Wrox site at some point as well.

I'm hoping to see a lot of mods of the projects in the book. Multiplayer would be really cool. :)

I have to thank Chris and Wrox for the opportunity to be associated with the production of the book. It was a great experience. It helps when you've got a guy like Ben whose work you're looking at. :D

Tons o' stuff released for XNA

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:02:08 GMT

There's been a huge update of content on the XNA Creators Club Online site. See the XNA Team Blog post here. The Racer Starter Kit that everyone has been looking for is just one of the pieces, albeit the largest one. :)

Think XNA is just a kid's toy game development tool. Take a look and think again. ;)

XNA Talk

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 14:47:58 GMT

I gave a talk last night on XNA to the BaltoMSDN group. It seemed to go ok. There were some technical difficulties before we got started. Seems my laptop didn't want to display on the projector the company that was hosting the event had provided using S-Video. Luckily Tronster came to my rescue with a DVI connector. About 5 minutes before we got started I realized that I didn't have the XNA Launcher on my 360 (it had been replaced about a week ago). I then had to generate a new key and put it into Game Studio Express. I got it all sorted out before I began, but it would have been embarassing if I hadn't remembered. Then again, it might have been good to show setting it all up. Hind-sight is 20/20. :(

As I didn't know the background of the group in game development, I erred on the side of caution and had a lot of "What is XNA" type material. I did do a couple of demos (including deploying a "Hello World" type sample to the 360 and demonstrating the debugging functionality), showed the DungeonQuest game that Ben had whipped up at the GDC, and tried to show a video of the racing starter kit that's upcoming (seems like the video might be gone from YouTube :( )

If I had to do it all over again, I probably would do more code diving, but I claim ignorance of the target audience expectations and inexperience in public speaking. :D

All-in-all it was a good time, at least for me. I hope everyone got something out of it and that it made them interested in looking at what XNA can do. The question did come up about non-game possibilities since it was mainly an application development crowd. Maybe some of them will look at it for that and give game development a try. :)

Unit Manager Sample Uploaded

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:25:45 GMT

In response to a post on the Creators Club Online forums, I whipped up a quick sample of a class that manages RTS (or any genre) units. Check it out here. If I get a chance, I'll spruce it up a little since the current version is totally barebones (what do you expect for a half-hours, if that, worth of work).

XNA Tower Defense Game

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:38:43 GMT

There was this great little time waster of a game that had circulated around various game dev sites a while back. A couple versions can be found in this thread on GameDev.net. Well, some of the guys on the Efnet IRC channel have gotten together and are creating an XNA version. It's looking very nice so far for only having been worked on for 4 or 5 days. John's blog here has some posts on it with video and screenshots. Keep your eye on this, as it's sure to be a fine example of what can be done quickly using XNA technology.

XNA Game Studio Express Update News

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 20:04:11 GMT

Yes, we've still got a little while to wait. Exactly how long is unsure, but it'll only be about a month. The XNA Team Blog has been updated with some of what we can expect to see in the update. Check it out here. Hopefully the "Many more changes" includes GUI support.

New XNA Site

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:05:38 GMT

Short and sweet - clicky

Enjoy!

New Creator's Club Site & Dream-Build-Play Prizes Announced

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 14:37:10 GMT

So the new Creator's Club site is up, as this post on the XNA Team blog says, along with info on the prizes for the Dream-Build-Play competitions. All I can say is "WOW!". Even though I didn't need any incentive to enter the competition, they've given a lot to those that might have been questioning entering. I'm really going to have to get my act together now to make sure what I submit is the best it can be. I've got some cool features that I hope will be interesting enough to help me score well in the judging.

It looks like I'm going to be spending a good chunk of the day taking in all the new content on the Creator's Club site. The free TorqueX license is a pretty sweet deal. I'm still waiting to see what 3D features they incorporate into the engine (assuming they are) before I really start digging into it. There's also the possibility that MS will add in a lot of 3D support to the framework in the new version. I'm hoping to hear about this at next week's MVP Summit. I'll be posting whatever non-NDA stuff I can after I get back so stay tuned.

Dream Build Play Warm-Up Challenge

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:23:31 GMT

Microsoft has update the Dream Build Play website with a warm up challenge - Relatives of Spacewar. The winner earns $500. Not bad for a 3 week project. Yup, that's all you have to mod the Space War starter kit. Head on over to the How To Play page for the full rules.

XNA First Person Shooter camera demo

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 13:22:19 GMT

Posted on the MSDN XNA boards - http://www.dhpoware.com/

It looks like it has some nice features that I haven't seen implemented elsewhere. I'll be checking it out soon.

XNA Requirements Checker

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 02:19:45 GMT

One of the guys on the MSDN forums has written an app that checks for and installs (when possible) the requirements for running XNA games. Download it from here.

XNA PR in Official Xbox Magazine

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 15:55:41 GMT

XNA and the Creators Club gets another mention in the March '07 Xbox Magazine in The OXM 30 - a list of "The people and games that will define Xbox 360 in 2007!" The Dream Build Play competition will likely be the big thing for XNA in 2007. Now if the team would just update the site with all the information we've been craving!

XNA Books

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 15:45:33 GMT

Just added a new book to the list. I'm not sure what it covers that Ben's book doesn't. That's one of the problems with programming books. They all seem to have a bit of overlap in them. Hopefully a place like Barnes & Noble where you can walk in and take a look at it will carry it so you can see if it's worth the purchase. The only one I'm sure that is worthwhile at this point is Ben's book.