Pay to Play (and even dev)

So the first thing I tried was playing around with Visual Studio's Platform Starter Kit demo. This is a simple little gem collection game with 3 levels. The first thing I did once getting it running was try to deploy it to my XBox.

Plenty of hoops to jump through, and some money, to get this working.

First you have to download the the XNA Game Studio Connect "game" to your XBox. Then you run it, where in lies the catch! In order to run the Game Studio Connect you have to purchase the Premium Membership from Microsoft (Premium is the lowest membership...go figure). Once you shell out $99 to purchase the membership, you can launch the Game Studio Connect. At this point you can sync your computer to the XBox via XNA Game Studio Device Center.

Now, after all then (and $99) you can FINALLY deploy the crappy little example game to your XBox and play it. Yay!!! So worth $99....

Creating an XNA XBox Game

Every day there are a couple hundred new iPhone games being published. With odds like that you pretty much have to create a killer app in order be noticed and create any revenue from your efforts.

On the flip side, there is Microsoft's recently renamed platform for allowing amateur game developers access to selling their games on the XBox 360; Indie Games.

In order to create a game to publish on Indie Games, you have to use Microsoft's XNA GameStudio game framework. Together with C#, Visual Studio 2008, $99, and some code skills, anyone can create a game and publish it on the XBox 360.

The games run for $1, $2, $5, or $10, and Microsoft gets 30% of the revenue for your game.

This blog will be my storyline for creating an XBox 360 game from scratch, and the trials and lessons learned in the process.