This past week the MVPs (myself included) were on Microsoft campus for the MVP summit. So I apologize in advance if you did something cool or heard of something cool happening with XNA and XBLIGs and it’s not in my notes. I did my best to stay on top of things, but honestly this community is fast and furious with what it’s doing and creating. I really can’t keep up and that’s fantastic!
But here’s what I *did* notice while I was there on Microsoft Campus (and I did make sure to point out to the XNA team several of these very cool happenings while I had their ears).
Time Critical XNA News:
- The XNA team wants you to know that Dream Build Play registration is now open!
- Join the XNA-UK create on March 24, 2011 at the Microsoft Tech Days Conference
XNA Team:
- Shawn Hargreaves shares one of the coolest things that’s happened in the XNA community
- Nick Gravelyn continues his unique marketing/work prioritization strategy as he tries to get to 5,000 Pixel Man users before he makes Pixel Man 2 (and he’s almost there!)
XNA MVPs:
- A lot of the XNA MVPs were at the Microsoft MVP Summit 2011. Due to NDAs, most things can’t be shared, but I’m sure if you’re curious you could ask them about the general vibe and feeling they got from the team and the future of XNA/XBLIG and more.
- Catalin Zima and team release the free WP7 game Chickens Can Dream
- Charles Humphrey (NemoKrad) posts his March talk source and PowerPoint
XNA Developers:
- Michael B. McLaughlin posts about ANTS Memory Profile and creates a CheckMemoryAllocationGame sample (extremely useful if you’re looking to see how much memory some operation allocates!)
- Andy Schatz (2009 IGF winner for Monaco) talking XNA at GDC 2011
Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG):
- Clover: A Curious Tale by BinaryTweed is coming as a Deal of the Week during St. Patricks Day
- Ska Studios away at GDC but still very post happy as always
- Just Press Start interviews Matthew Mikuszewski of Darkwind Media about Blocks Indie
- Gamergeddon Xbox Indie Game Round Up - February 27th
- GameMarx does a round up of all the Xbox Live Indie Game podcasts that are currently available
- GameMarx episode 11
- In perhaps what I feel is the most exciting news I’ve heard all week, Michael C. Neel (ViNull of GameMarx fame) re-launch XboxIndies.com!
- Armless Octopus shares a little of what they heard from Luke Schneider of Radiangames during his GDC 2011 talk
- VVGindiecast Episode 1 with guests Derek Strickland(Mr_Deeke), Kris Steele(Kriswd40 from FunInfused Games) and Dave Voyles(From armlessoctopus.com)
- If you’re doing Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews get in touch with XboxIndies.com to get into their aggregated feed
- B.U.T.T.O.N and Flotilla represented XNA very well at the Independent Games Festival (are there any more games entered that were created using XNA? Stand up and be heard!)
- Armless Ocotopus interview at GDC 2011 with Soulcaster creator Ian Stocker
- MommysBestGames gets a nod in the DarkBasic newsletter where it features the Explosionade Editor (just do a search for Explosionade to get to the interesting bits!)
- You may be hearing the cries of FortressCraft (coming soon to XBLIG) being so wrong for stealing the idea from MineCraft. But did you know the the game MineCraft started from was an XNA game called Infiniminer? XNA is getting it’s fingers into EVERYTHING!
XNA Development:
- TorqueX is NOT dead thanks to the tremendous efforts of the XNA Community working on the CEV (special thanks to @PinoEire for all his hard work on making that happen!)
- Dave Henry has posted XNA 3.x adding platformer start kit to the network game state management on his new site
- Mark Bamford releases XNAViewer 4.0, great for running XNA games inside of a Windows Form (for building level editors, etc.)
- Unit testing an XNA game with Resharper and NUnit
- XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 5 - Input (touch + gestures)
- Mike McLaughlin shares a link he stumbled across for those looking to understand vector and matrix math
- DigitalRune Resources Pooling in XNA (Part 1)
- JohnK “bobthecbuilder” released a new SunBurn Update that lowers the requirements for Windows Games
- Quick update on the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.4 development status