What a free 12-month trial subscription to XNA?

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Jeku

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Posted: 8th Apr 2009 21:01 Edited at: 8th Apr 2009 21:01

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The new Dream Build Play contest started yesterday, and the deadline is in August. If you sign up they will give you a free 12-month trial for XNA (regularly $99 for 1 year). It's pretty cool even if you're not interested in developing a game for the contest. But why not? There's a cool $40k for the winner

http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/default.aspx

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Dragon Knight

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Posted: 8th Apr 2009 21:04

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i was so hoping i could create something in DBP for this, though thanks for the post jeku

http://www.hybridwolves.co.uk

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dark coder

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Posted: 9th Apr 2009 08:22 Edited at: 9th Apr 2009 08:23

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I was looking into XNA and other than it being .NET, THIS really put me off. I don't have a 360 so I can't say for myself but many of the posters were saying that it's no surprise there's so little sales because it's hard to find the community games and that there's no quality control over the released products so people would be put off from buying them. Also, on the list you can see DuoTrix which is a game made by BinaryZoo(one of their coders used to be a regular here).

So personally if you're after getting published games I'd go after Steam as they seem to care a lot more about their indie games, I've no idea how easy it is to get them to publish stuff though.

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Jeku

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Posted: 9th Apr 2009 17:20 Edited at: 9th Apr 2009 17:22

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Quote: "So personally if you're after getting published games I'd go after Steam as they seem to care a lot more about their indie games, I've no idea how easy it is to get them to publish stuff though."

Just so you know, with XNA you can also make Windows games. You don't *have* to focus on 360 development. The $99 cost is attributed to doing 360 games, but XNA can just as easily make Windows games that you can, in theory, use on Steam. And it's free to make Windows games with XNA.

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David R

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Posted: 9th Apr 2009 17:25 Edited at: 9th Apr 2009 17:26

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Quote: "I was looking into XNA and other than it being .NET, THIS really put me off."

It's not just that though - I was mainly surprised by how little boilerplate code is actually already in it.

Considering the point of XNA is to reduce tediousness, the fact it doesn't have simple tools (like, say a built in FPS counter, for example) was quite shocking + annoying. Missing basic things like that, it completely destroyed the point of even trying to use it, so I just stuck with native code

Until XNA actually makes development significantly easier (which in my opinion, it does not: it gives everything simple names and terms, but it doesn't make it any easier to 'combine' them) I don't really see the point in using it, due to the significant speed cut and requirement of a whopping great framework on top of .NET