Creators Club Communiqué 34

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*PHEW*! What a long, strange trip this summer has been! After we wrapped up PAX we devoted some time to retuning the IDN (Independent Developer Network) Team and planning all sorts of good things for 2010!

One of those is 2010’s Dream.Build.Play Challenge! This year there are actually *two* challenges where independent game developers worldwide can compete for cash and glory. One is our standard DBP Challenge you’ve come to know and love; the other is new this year, The Microsoft Old Spice Challenge! There’s always lots of excitement around Dream.Build.Play and lots of questions. We’ve recently posted a FAQ that addresses many of these questions. As ever, the Dream.Build.Play forums on XNA Creators Club Online are a great resource for answers and inspiration!

As of today, Xbox LIVE Indie Games offers more than 600 games that you cannot find anywhere else! Tracy even crafted this beautiful 3D pie chart to give you an idea of the variety of games our catalog offers:

bygenre

Meanwhile, per usual, our incredible community of Creators has been sharing their own brilliant insights to help everyone make great games!

Are you just starting out? Curious about what it takes to learn how to make a game? XNA Creators Club Online’s Getting Started Guide is always a good source. An additional starter tutorial series has been recently posted by the UK XNA User Group called “Programming in C# with XNA". If you’re a beginner, or just want to check to make sure your fundamentals are sound, they’ve offered a great resource!

For Creators who feel ready for something a bit more advanced, these guys always drop sweet knowledge!

  • Shawn “Code Maestro” Hargreaves wrote his “Premultiplied Alpha Blending” series because according to him “the way most people do alpha blending is bogus!” That’s right. Bogus. You just got served.
  • PIX is a fantastic program that helps tons of great creators make their games even greater. Matt “Don’t Pet Me” Pettineo wrote a fantastic tutorial for getting started with PIX and XNA Game Studio at his blog, MJP’s XNA Danger Zone
  • Manders vs.Machine shares lots about using PIX with XNA Game Studio. In this post he gets real specific about importing and rendering XAML shape data in XNA Game Studio.
  • Lots of folks like to critique games once they are finished. Nick “Tall Drink of Water” Gravelyn actually offers constructive and insightful feedback through his blog on what he believes made Echoes+ so good. He also shares an honest post-mortem of his own title, Pixel Man.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what can be found out there if you want to learn more about creating games using XNA Game Studio. If you’ve got a suggestion for a great post to share through the Creators Club Communique please feel free to send it along to me at XNAKat@microsoft.com.

Meanwhile, keep surprising us with all your awesome Xbox LIVE Indie Games!

xxoo

~kathleen sanders

XNA Community Manger