Sadly the Dream, Build, Play contest is over :-( and I hope you got a change to submit your game. As the site says we'll be announcing the winner at Gamefest 2007 which takes place August 12th. If you haven't taken a look at any of the entries yet Michael from Ziggyware has posted a great list of screenshots from entries in the contest. Most of the games include links to videos or the actual game that you can download and play.
Before I make too many comments let me say that as much as I would have liked to have been I am not a judge in the Dream, Build, Play, contest. So while I may like a game that doesn't mean it would be a finalist or winner cause I don't have any influence on that process. That said many of us on the team have tried some of the games that are available for public download and to put it simply we've had a blast. One specific game we also had a lot of fun with Little Gamers, one of our testers kept playing till he beat the game but tried to insist he was looking for problems with the framework the whole time ;-) I could list pretty much every game we've played but it's the same list that I've linked to above.
I'm amazingly impressed with every single game featured on that site. Every game plays, or looks like a unique experience which is exactly the type of creativity that XNA Game Studio Express is trying to enable. It's not easy putting together such great concepts in such a short amount of time, so to everyone that submitted a game, my hat is off to you! Good luck to everyone and I can't wait to see who wins!
Well, it's been a while. Last week I contacted a friend of mine that I've known since grade school, we're great friends but always have trouble picking up the phone so we tend to go for long periods of time without talking. He mentioned that he's been keeping up with what I've been doing and tried a few times to contact me through my blog, he even mentioned that he had one of his friends try as well. I was pretty stumped but decided to investigate further. It turns out that my blog wasn't sending any of the emails along despite receiving a notice that "Message was sent successfully".
So if you've sent me a message recently, and haven't heard anything from me I am truly sorry but I never got any of the messages. The problem has been fixed so if you try to "Contact Me", I'll get the message if you'd like to try again or didn't get your question answered. I also did quite a bit of housekeeping on my blog too, I'm now upgraded to Community Server 2007 and have a bunch of the stuff turned off (like user registration) which really isn't needed for a single blog like mine.
As always if you have things with XNA Game Studio Express you's like to hear about or have covered let me know. We have a lot of the technical stuff out there on Shawn's blog and Eli's blog but there's always other stuff about what we're doing and where were going with the product that I'd be more than happy to write about. What other information would you like to hear about beyond coding with XNA Game Studio Express?
Either way Gamefest is less than a month away now, and it's hard to believe that it's almost been a year since we announced XNA Game Studio Express. As Dave hinted at on our forums, it seems to be a good time to talk about what might be coming next :-)