Tag: XNA

Community Games & disappointed developpers.

Raphaël Leave a comment

Last sunday, XBLA-Community Games creators could see for the very first time their long-awaited sales figures, and many of them were quite disappointed by such a gap between the facts and their expectations.

As for ArkX, I must say it was a pretty good surprise for me. I didn’t know what to expect, because ArkX was my first game on XBox360, but I feel it sold much better than many of my fellow developpers games.

Community games is a very young system, but it is true many things could (and hopefully will) be improved:

There is no ranking on CG.

This was, from my point of view, the biggest complain. Now, any player who wants to get a game from the community has to browse 200+ games. Of course, there are categories, but yet, it’s hard to get tempted unless you already know what you are looking for. I read on the forum this will be implemented soon.

Not enough communication about Community Games.

That’s a fact, MS didn’t light up CG. Only developpers (or dev friends) know about this service. From my point of view, I think MS WILL communicate when they will think the system is more mature. It is only a mater of time. (Well, why on earth would they organise contests like DBP if they planned to keep this service hidden?)

Achievements are not available

that’s true achievements are a big incentive for sales, many gamers buying games to get an higher score. I understand Microsoft wants to keep achievements for retail/XBLA games. However it would really be good to have something CG players can compete on. Some people suggested to allow up to 100 achievement points to CG, or to make a distinct points category (for instance, a gamer could have 15000 Point and 1220 CG points). I don’t know which solution is the best, and I hope Microsoft will do something about it. However, nothing has been announced in this direction.

The quality of entries has to be improved

It is also clearly the responsability to creators to improve the quality of their productions. It is not easy (we didn’t expect this at all, but I think I spend as much time  on fixing/polishing than on coding for ArkX).There are many very cool titles, with a lot of polish, and really fun to play, but there is also a lot of entries that could be improved.

I think that’s globally what I could read on creators club forum. As a conclusion, I think there is a big opportunity now : MS will probably do their best to make this service an “appstore-like”. No need to be a genius to know it’s easier to get noticed when only 200 games are available on the service. And whenever MS will start to communicate about CG, the best games will definately start to sell a lot more.

To sum up, I tried this service with ArkX for fun, now I make some money out of it, and even there are drawbacks due to the youth of the system, I’m definitely in for the DBP2009!

Links:

Publishing a Game on XBOX 360

Raphaël Leave a comment

Today, my first XBox Game has been published on the Live marketplace! It was definitely a great experience, and I am very grateful to all the playtesters and reviewers from the creators club. However, my submission took a lot of time, and that could have been avoided if I were a little more cautious. So in this post, I’ll try to give you some tips to make the publishing process smoother.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should take a look to this introduction to game dev for XBox360 using XNA.

Ok, you made an XNA game, and you’d like to sell it on the marketplace. First, you’ll need a premium subscription to creators.xna.com. It will allow you to present your game for playtest and for review. Then, if you want everything to go smooth:

Follow strictly the microsoft guidelines.

The reviewers will also base their judgement on those guidelines. While some points can be discussed, most of them will be a fail reason if you don’t follow them. Here is a list of the common things to think carefully before you can submit your game:

  • – Pause your game if the player disconnect his pad, or if he displays any kind of guide.
  • – Write carefully your load/save code. Save asynchronously, and think about the players having an hard disk and a MU.
  • – Do NOT suppose your player will use only the first controller.
  • – Use fonts/sprites big enough to look OK even on SD screens
  • – Running your game on XBox IS different than running it on your computer. Expect a bit of optimization, and think about the off-screen areas on TVs
  • – Avoid crashes at any cost (easy :-))

Have a decent playtest session

After you submit your game for playtest, you should get many feedbacks from other developpers. It’s always a pain to work again on something you considered as finished, but if you listen to their advices, you’ll save yourself a lot of time for the review. And just think about the price a testing team would cost you if you had to pay them!

Think carefully about “presentation”

Before you submit for review, you should work a little bit on the images, screenshots and descriptions that will represent your game. The screenshot are important to make people actually willing to review, and ultimately play your game. Same for the jacket and icon.

The description, however, is a bit tricky : I recommend you to set a description only in the language you localized your game. For instance, if you submit a game in english only, don’t write a french description. (this is what I did for ArkX, and understood only recently it was a mistake). Your game will have to be reviewed by people who speaks the languages you set. So if you set a french, spanish and italian description, you’ll need to be reviewed by ppl speaking spanish/english, italian/english, and french/english. The amount of this kind of reviewer being much lower than english reviewers, you may get stuck because of a lack of review in a particular language. So just set a description in a language you translated your game in before submitting your game for review.

Don’t take review personnally

This point isn’t a particularity of XNA games. Developpers have quite often a deep relationship with their own code, and take the critics very personnally. If someone fails your game, it means there WAS a fail reason. It can be discussed, and your game won’t be rejected only for a fail. On the other hand, if someone else fails your game, (2 fails will result in a reject), it merely means you should fix things, and submit again. Of course, easier said than done, but ArkX was rejected 4 times before approval, and at some point, I was even wondering if it was worth to keep working. But then, after reading posts on forums, I could see the reviewers were only doing what was asked to them. And it saves a lot of time when someone tells you where the problem is. (this point is from my own experience of the reviewing process, so it may not fit to anyone)

Do your bit of community

The playtester and reviewers are developpers like yourself. It will strongly help your submission if you review some game as well. I didn’t understand this at first, but I could get more review after I started to be a bit more active on reviewing and on the community forums. And some games are really fun to review, so don’t hesitate!

In any case, good luck for your submission, and trust me, it’s worth your efforts! (euphory from the approval mail didn’t leave me yet)

GXView 1.0.2b available, testers welcome!

Raphaël Leave a comment

Hello everyone, and Happy new year!

I improved a little GXView, and here is the latest version! Here below are the key features:

Image manipulation

  • – resize (bicubic, linear or no interpolation)
  • – very straightforward cropping function
  • – undo-redo
  • – rotate
  • – save as…
  • – compile as XNB asset
  • – next/prev image (like the windows image preview)
  • – screen captures
  • – Useful infos : coordinates, RGB, YUV…

3D viewer

  • – Loads FBX, .X or compiled XNB
  • – Compile into XNB
  • – Display useful info (polygon counter, face counter…)

XML

  • – Simple XML Editor/Viewer

3D Environment

  • – Heightmap generator (perlin)

The video capture is still in progress, and the 3D env should evolve a lot soon.

What about making a blocbuster for XBox 360 together?

Raphaël Leave a comment

Hi everyone

Long time I didn’t post anything about XBox dev here. As you may know, we submited ArkX as a dream build play 2008 entry. Well, it didn’t win, but it helped us to get our hand into XNA and coding for XBox.

Now we will soon release ArkX as a community game. And we are already thinking about the next step : a bigger, better, and more impressive game.

The basic idea is a mix of Fury3, Tyriann and Starflight. To sum up, a first-person spacecraft game, with tons of weapons and upgrades to buy, quests in a vast universe, and many planets to explore/prospect.

We are currently 3 on the project: a 3D modeler, a scenarist/2D artist/manager, and myself (coder), and we’re looking for talented and highly motivated people to help us. Mainly musicians, artists and coders.

Ideally, we will end up in a team of 7 people, the maximum for a DBP entry.

As for rewards, well, first, to be involved in a game for XBox360 is quite a thing. But there is another, more financial goal : There was 70K US$ at stake in DBP 2008… Let’s make something great, and we won’t get unnoticed in the next edition of DBP. And since community games is now opened, in any case we will publish our masterpiece as a Community Game, and income will of course be shared between team members.

So what are you waiting for? enroll!!