Introducing Our New Community Manager!

Hello!

At last Creators Club (and XNA.com) has a new community manager! My name is Kathleen Sanders and you may have seen me in other places around the internets. I’m a lifetime lover of video games and a longtime believer in the power of independent creators in all aspects of entertainment, particularly gaming.  There are greater challenges for a passionate, independent developer of games than any other medium.  Any jerk with a webcam can end up on YouTube screaming something worthless into the void. Creating a game, even the most basic game, takes an impressive investment of time and effort. Despite the barriers to entry, there are thousands of indie game developers out there looking for people to play their game. This fall, Xbox LIVE Community Games hopes to give them access to a few million of those people.

I’m not a space brain. I don’t know how to make a game yet, but that serves to increase my admiration for those who do. I consider the way that you can take an insane amount of numbers and letters and shove them through my TV screen as something I can play is a sort of space magic to me. To help me with that side of things will be Charles Cox. He’ll be helping get more developer education content out to you about every two weeks – starting today!

Here’s Charles now to tell you about what we’ve got for you:

If you’ve been looking to make your own 2D and 3D shaders to enhance the basic drawing functions provided by SpriteBatch and BasicEffect, these utilities are your ticket. They’re the full shader source code with supporting documentation so you can start plugging in your own shader code to ramp up your games’ graphics. You can download it right now in the Utilities section of the XNA Creators’ Club Online Website .

For those of you hungry for more content, stay tuned – later this month we’ll have a set of new samples including an AI flock behavior sample, the next installment of the Shader Series, and a shadow mapping sample.

Back to Kathleen!

Thanks, Charles - for my part, I’ll be working with our partners throughout Microsoft and beyond to increase awareness of what we’re doing here. I’m going to be your voice and advocate. I want to make sure that the world knows about what you’re making and how you’re doing it. You’ll see more content hitting Creators Club and beyond to this end. You guys are the reason I’m here so please feel free to ask me any questions you might have (within reason – don’t be creepy) and share your ideas with me. On the forums and XBL my handle is ‘Cookiecups’.  Also – we’ll be at PAX! Be sure to let me know if you’re going to be there!

xxoo
~kath