Microsoft XNA Game Camp

This is the formula: mix 80 students, put 48 hours non stop coding, add good amount of Red Bull some food and Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 and you will have 16 high quality games.

Our team in UK held the X48 GameCamp in collaboration with Channel 4  at Derby University. The event saw 80 students from across the UK from both technical and design schools converge at Derby University‘s game studios to create a game in less than 48 hours fuelled only by their imagination (and copious amounts of confectionary and hundreds of Red Bulls).

The students really rose to the challenge creating 16 awesome games demonstrating how easy it is to produce professional quality games using XNA. During the whole event there was a real buzz in the air and the students all went away very happy if a little tired.

The winning game came from a  team of two from Huddersfield University who employed a really simple one button approach and did a great job of integrating the theme of evolution into the fabric of the game. Their game was called Seavolution and is now available at https://www.x48gamecamp.com/games along with all of the games from the event.

You can re experience the whole event here:

https://vimeo.com/groups/x48 - 107 videos
https://www.flickr.com/groups/1038141\@N23/ 377 glossy photographs
https://search.twitter.com/search?q=x48 (Favourite tweet – “This one time, at XNA Band Camp, my code broke” )

This is what I call fun!