Well, my advanced programming students finally have a 2d shooter game that they have almost completed. It's been fun watching the development of their games. Some students are tweaking their sprite graphic, some are adding different sounds. Dan Waters from Microsoft will be coming to speak to my students on Tuesday about the new XNA framework that will allow you to create a game for a Zune. Dan has a great blog on XNA and I used his resources during the semester.
I have been experiencing deploying some of the games that are almost completed to an XBOX 360 to see how the game will look with playing the game from an XBOX 360. One thing we noticed was that the colors on the pc monitor were different than the colors generated when the game gets played from the XBOX. Dan has a good video from his blog on how to deploy your game to an XBOX.
Next time that I teach the class, I'll spend less time teaching C# and more time on XNA. My students knew JAVA and all I really had to do was to just give a review of C# and not spend 8 weeks teaching the same concepts that they already knew.
My students will now finish their game and create a video on their game and we'll put those videos up on youtube for others to view. Here's a picture of a Sonic Game.
I wish DreamSpark was now available for high school students so my students could get a 12-month free Academic membership in the XNA Creators Club.
