23rd February 2008

Microsoft have just announced that coming soon, indie XNA developers and XNA enthusiasts will be able to host their games on XBox live for anyone who owns a Xbox 360 to download and play.

From XNA.Com

“Starting with the beta launch of the Xbox LIVE Community Games service later this spring, subscribers of the XNA Creators Club will be able to submit their own game creations for self-distribution through to Xbox LIVE Marketplace via the http://creators.xna.com website….the game will then be added to the global games catalog on Xbox LIVE Marketplace and available to gamers worldwide connected to Xbox LIVE.”

There are details currently being finalised regarding the revenue streams available to XNA developers for this new exciting service.

If you have an Xbox 360 there is a preview version of the service available right now, and you can currently download seven indie games for free (if you live in the USA or selected countries, apparently not Australia for the time being :(  Rollout timetables are different per country)

Also in the announcement are XNA Zune Games and updates to the XNA Creator’s club website.

Check it out.

22nd February 2008

Everyone needs to start somewhere. Now that XNA has been out for a while, there are plenty of resources available on the web, all it takes is a little Googling, and a small amount of time to allow anyone to create a simple game.

The above picture is my result from quickly going through some tutorials I found at Riemer’s XNA Tutorials. Riemer takes a really simplistic approach to the tutorials, making no assumptions about the reader’s previous abilities, short of a basic knowledge of programming and C#. The tutorials start at the basics from setting up your first project and guide the reader, through thoroughly explained theory and practical examples, to a point where they should be able create a simple flight simulator or off-road car game. Riemer covers many topics, such as heightmap terrain, HLSL, basic collision detection, alpha blending, sky boxes and lake water rendering.

The tutorials do a lot of hand-holding, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it simply means that reader’s need to ensure they understand the concepts before moving on to the next tutorial. To help with this, Riemer has even provided the full source code for each step in the tutorials.

Riemer also has a book coming out, which I am highly anticipating, however it was intended to be released in December and appears to have been delayed. I’m guessing this is due to Game Studio Express 2.0’s arrival.

So, go check it out and you too can create a serene mountainous backdrop.

18th February 2008

Here we have it, the first cut of Exploding Studios’ new website. Now it might still be a little rough around the edges, but we’ll be ironing out those little wrinkles over the coming weeks.

Now that we have the site at a semi-presentable state, it’s time to get started on what’s really important. We’ve just started out the primary stages of the development of our new XNA project, code named (for lack of a title) To The Top. As the project gets under way, look out for news and game development tidbits posted on the site. We’ll attempt to make an effort to keep the site updated as much as possible.

Stay tuned, we’ll be posting more information about To The Top soon…