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XNA Game Development Attracts Lots of Interest

Company: Microsoft
Product: XNA Game Development

Imagine a conference filled with Programmers and IT professionals seeking to find out the latest information about Microsoft products. Thousands of self-proclaimed geeks attend several sessions per day in an attempt to stay current with the latest tips, tricks and features of everything from Visual Studio to Outlook and from SQL Server to Windows Operating Systems. There are presentations given in large auditoriums. There are "Chalk Talks" given in a small, intimate space that holds about 20-30 people, a couple of presenters and a well-used whiteboard. This was a place for business professionals to interact with each other, to learn new things and to share personal experiences, struggles and triumphs with their peers.

And, in the midst of all of this, a single session stood out. DEV344 - Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express: Creating Your First Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 Game. Mind you, this was TechEd, not GDC or E3 or the Austin Games Workshop. We knew we just had to cover this session, but we had to wonder if many people would show up to this session. Besides the fact that the conference was not exactly geared towards games, the time-slot was the last time-slot for sessions on the day of the TechEd party, which was to be at Universal Islands of Adventure. Four hours of free food, drink and rides at a theme park is not something you get to enjoy very often. It's also likely that a lot of attendees would want to change clothes before the party. Yet another reason to expect attendance to be light; people would be rushing to change clothes before the party, undoubtedly that time-slot would be lighter than normal.

While I'm sure a lot of people probably did duck out on the last session, I was quite pleasantly surprised to see that the session on game development was completely filled. When we got our seats, it was not yet time for the session to start and it was hard to find three seats together. The ushers were warning that no one would be allowed to stand, due to fire regulations. The room filled up completely and a couple of people managed to grab a piece of floor without being ejected. It was amazing to see such an interest in game development from mainstream application developers. This is truly the independent, hobbyist audience Microsoft was aiming for with the Xbox 360 Creators' Club; it only helps that these professionals are already familiar with the Visual Studio IDE and, in many cases, the C# programming language.

Only a couple of slides were used to give a brief overview of the layers that make XNA work, and then David "LetsKillDave" Weller went right to demonstrations. In the course of about an hour, he took the elements provided in one of the tutorials that comes with XNA and developed a fully functional Asteroids clone, complete with collision detection, scoring and separate background and HUD-style overlay elements.

Dave did a good job of keeping the presentation moving, despite a couple of incidents here and there. He explained the parts of the code that he was adding in and when something would get fouled-up (which is always to be expected in a live demo), he would open another version of the project that was "pre-baked" to a different level of completion and, fairly smoothly, continue his demonstration.

The presentation was recorded on video for inclusion in the DVD, and is currently available for viewing online for TechEd 2007 attendees via the TechEd 2007 website.

For more information about XNA development and for related downloads, check out Dave Weller's Blog (LetsKillDave.com) with the link below. Also, I've added a link to video of a demo given by Dave Weller, "Make a Game in 60 Minutes", at the XNA Creators' Club website; this is the same demo as was presented at TechEd 2007, but was performed at a different time.



-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications
AKA Ashley Perkins

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