Creators Club Communiqué 11

Xbox LIVE Community Games is well on its way! We’re currently showing more than SEVENTY games in the catalog. There are a few things we’ve learned along the way that I want to call attention to here.

1. Playtesting is IMPORTANT. Please be sure to use this handy dandy service to make sure that your game is as free from bugs as possible, because…

2. Peer Review is not for Playtesting! We’re looking into ways of limiting Peer Review, because some people seem to be abusing it.

3. We are a community! This means that we should all be helping each other out by staying active, helping others to Playtest, and helping out with Peer Reviews (even if your own game isn’t ready for or has already been through Playtest and Peer Review)

4. We shouldn’t use words like Achievements and Leaderboards. We don’t technically have them, so it makes it confusing. Some folks have found some uncanny workarounds, but for everyone’s happiness please don’t call them Achievements and Leaderboards. We like the word “Awards.” In fact, MVP Nick “Awardment Unlocked” Gravelyn posted a pretty awesome article on creating award systems for your game. Daniel Hanson even offered a way to create progressive awards and link them to Gamertags. (Thanks to Ziggyware for hosting both of these articles)

5. You are really awesome. No one else has done this before and you’re all helping create some really incredible stuff. In fact, we’re getting lots of attention for it, too.

Check out this article in Game Informer on what they went through creating their own game using XNA Game Studio 3.0 (with the help of our own Frank “Sophisticate” Savage)

The Independent Games Festival is gearing up and we’re proud to say that several of the entries are built with XNA Game Studio! Our beloved Michael “Young MC” Klucher assembled a list of these titles on his blog. Check them out!

Finally, as a special treat just for Premium Members of XNA Creators Club Autodesk has just released a special version of the Softimage Mod Tool Pro enabled for commercial production use for Xbox LIVE Community Games only. You can read all about it and download it at the XNA Creators Club Online now!

xxoo

~kathleen sanders

XNA Community Manager