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.

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Title: In The Pit
Creator: luvcraft
Genre: Action & Adventure

Price: 400 Points

Countries: Canada, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, United States

languages: English

description
An “audio-only” stealth action game. Control a horrible monster who lives at the bottom of a dark pit and eats the people who fall in!

What We Think:
The graphics are absolutely unbelievable.  Somehow the guys at luvcraft managed to perfectly capture the look of being a completely blind monster living in a pitch black pit. Somehow they even squeezed in uncompressed high polygon PC’s with no lag or frame rate issues.  How they accomplished this on a small XNA release like this is completely mind-blowing.

Additionally, the idea of making a game using echo-location, that is – where movement and action is based primarily on directional sound – is the reason why the Xbox Live Community Games section is really so exciting.  Finally people can innovate and not worry about massive budgets to hamper their creativity.

The only problem with this title is that unless you have headphones you can plug in to your amp, or surround speakers, it’s kind of impossible to play.  It does however use force feedback as well.

Rating:  

Do you think there is a future in echo-location titles?