Get an insider’s look at breaking into the game industry with a focus on XNA Game Studio and other platforms from PAX 2009.  We chose part 2 of 5.  Unfortunately the audio leaves much to be desired, but hoepfully you can get some ideas from this clip in approaching your dream of designing an indie game for Xbox Live.

Panelists Include: Denise Novosel [Moderator] – (Staffing Manager IEB and E&D, Microsoft), Kim Swift (Game Designer, Valve Software), Kelvin Sung (Associate Professor Computing and Software Systems, University of Washington Bothell), Ron Jenkins (The Guildhall at SMU, Deputy Director), Joshua Hernandez (Producer, Metamoorephosis)

As a bonus here is IGN’s Top 100 Game Developers: Dave Perry – Breaking Into the Industry

Developer: MSR Kodu
Genre: Family, Game Creation
Price: 400 Points
Countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States
Languages: English

Developer Summary:
Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The visual programming environment allows rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input. Share your creations with friends over XBOX LIVE.

What We Think:
Kodu Game Lab is a unique and engaging Xbox Live Indie game, if you can call it that; it allows you to create your own games by providing you with a set of characters, objects, and environment editing tools, as well as allowing you to program (on a very high-level) different constraints and events.

Don’t get too excited – you can’t create the next Call of Duty game in Kodu.  However, it is a very stimulating way to get a very basic introduction to programming and to be rewarded for your creativity.  One example of a game I created was a maze-type game where you would have to navigate your way through a series of different rooms with various obstacles.  The first was a narrow bridge with clouds that try to kill you.  The next was a large room with jump pads that you had to use to reach a very high point.

You can program winning conditions, character hit points, paths for object movement, and so much more.  Each object and character has its own unique physical characteristics, as well. For example, the motorcycle is fast and can jump, but is difficult to steer, whereas the star is extremely fast and can turn on a dime.  You can also include support for up to four players in the game!   The idea is that while you can’t create a game of epic proportions (especially since you have limited amount of memory usage for each game), you can create pretty interesting things if you have innovative ideas.

Rating:  

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Even as the dust begins to settle from the 2009 E3 conference in Los Angeles, new announcements are emerging from Microsoft that amaze and astound.  Beyond the hands-free motion capturing Natal technology and the news that Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm will all soon be integrated directly into the Xbox Live experience, independent game designers will now have some powerful new features that will allow them to remain competitive in developing new games for the Xbox Live Community games marketplace.

Some of the most exciting features of the new XNA Game Studio software include:

Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.

Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.

Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:

• Full screen video playback
• Video playback to simple textures in game
• Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
• Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
• Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
• Play back multiple video streams at the same time

To see the complete list of new features available in XNA Game Studio 3.1 visit the official announcement site.

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