At GDC this week we’re giving everyone a first look at the latest and greatest, XNA Game Studio 4.0, which provides a powerful, productive, and portable technology for game development on Windows Phone 7 Series, Xbox 360, and Windows PC.

If you’re not familiar with Windows Phone 7 Series, take a look at some of our videos from Mobile World Congress. It’s something totally new and while I’ve only been working at Microsoft for what seems like a very short 4 1/2 years, I have never been so excited with what we’re helping game developers accomplish on such an incredible, consumer focused platform.

While you’ll find a full feature list on the XNA Creators Club Online site and from Shawn Hargreaves. I wanted to shout out answers to some of the burning questions I would have. Yes, We have hardware accelerated 3D API’s on Windows Phone 7 Series. Yes, We have Visual Studio 2010 integration with our toolset. We’ve even added buffered audio support to the Audio API’s that many of you have asked for.

The other key component of XNA Game Studio 4.0 that we’ve enabled exclusively for Xbox partners is Xbox LIVE and a premium gaming experience on Windows Phone 7 Series. Through the Gamer Services API’s you can pull in a user’s Gamertag and 2D Avatar as part of the game experience, unlock achievements on the platform, and leverage notifications for asynchronous turn based gaming.

This is a little different than things are today on the Xbox 360 console, and I expect there will be a few questions. I’ll be following up with a deeper post on our Xbox LIVE policies, but in essence, we’re making it easy to partner with us and there are lots of great features for all developers beyond Xbox LIVE APIs on Window Phone 7 Series.

But wait a minute? This is XNA Game Studio and it sounds like your one of the technologies for developing on Windows Phone 7 Series, isn’t XNA just for Indies? These are great questions. We love the independent developer, it was our target customer in 2006 when we opened up the Xbox 360 for everyone to start developing on a traditionally closed platform. In XNA Game Studio 3.1 and 4.0 we’ve shifted our focus to include what we call the studio developer, seen in products like XNA Game Studio Extensions for XDK for publishing games on Xbox LIVE Arcade. With Windows Phone 7 Series we’re targeting the developers who work in small teams at large studios as well as the lone programmer working solo on their first mobile game title. We think this benefits all game developers and continues to grow the usage of .NET for games for indies and high end professionals alike!

When we first announced XNA was a development platform for the Windows Phone 7 Series last week and followed up with some real-time Twitter Q&A (@WP7Dev), we got a lot of questions about Zune/Zune HD and how that will work with XNA Game Studio 4.0. Development for the Zune and Zune HD will continue to exist in XNA Game Studio 3.1, however, in XNA Game Studio 4.0, we’re encouraging you to migrate your games over to the Windows Phone 7 Series platform. We tested this a lot during development and had games like Hexic and Goo Splat up and running in an hour or so, it’s very easy! Finally, we learned some valuable lessons on launching a development platform. One of those lessons is that you need a way to bring your ideas to consumers at launch. All of us at Microsoft have heard that feedback, and I will say that it doesn’t matter what type of game developer you are, you’ll be able to find the perfect audience on Windows Phone 7 series. I know you’ll have a lot of questions about how this will work so I urge you to stay tuned to MIX ’10 where we’ll be streaming sessions live to the world and ready to answer more of your questions.

I’m excited to finally be able to talk to you all about XNA Game Studio 4.0 and Windows Phone 7 Series. If you’re new to XNA Game Studio learn more at http://creators.xna.com and get some details from http://ShawnHargreaves.com who has a great collection of information to get you started.

We have a busy week ahead of us but I want you to be part of the conversation even if you’re not at GDC. Shawn and myself will be bringing you some great sneak peeks at what we have going on at the show. You can follow some of the video posts we’ll have on Vimeo (mklucher), and please make sure to follow the entire Windows Phone 7 Series Dev Team on Twitter: (@ckindel) (@shawnhargreaves) (@ozymandias) (@ai) (@cschormann) (@lokeuei) (@mklucher) for more info as we head out to MIX ‘10!

-Michael

Why is this so exciting? The XNA Framework makes it easy to write games today using .NET that work both on Windows PC’s and the Xbox 360, leveraging Xbox LIVE. If you’ve used the XNA Framework before you might have even put your toe in the water developing mobile games on the Zune and Zune HD.

Across Microsoft, we’ve worked to bring the best technologies to Windows Phone 7 Series and provide a productive way for you to unlock the experiences that consumers are waiting for.

If you’re not familiar with XNA or Silverlight, let’s do some homework. For XNA, head over to http://creators.xna.com and check out the platform and for Silverlight catch up at http://silverlight.net/ it’s a lot to take in, but well worth the time!

I’m sure you all have a lot of questions when it comes to XNA, what you’ll be able to accomplish on Windows Phone 7 Series with XNA and how you’ll be able to accomplish it. I want to stress that Shawn Hargreaves and I with so many more of us are constantly listening and just bursting at the seams to tell you all about this great stuff. Keep an eye on everyone as they have some great info to share.

As you know we have two major conferences lined up next week, GDC and MIX 2010. I hope that we’ll see you there to be part of the discussion. Why not leave some feedback and let us know what you want to discuss?

GDC 2010 (3/9 – 3/13)

As with earlier years we’ll have the well-received Microsoft Game Developer Days Tuesday March 9^th and Wednesday March 10^th. It’s a great opportunity to learn about game development on Microsoft’s platforms. Here’s an overview of the sessions:

Tuesday, March 9th

• Visual C++ 2010: A Turbo Boost in Productivity
• System-wide Game Profiling with the Windows Performance Toolkit
• Building an Uber-Fast Crowd Renderer for Your Next Xbox 360 Engine
• Block Compression Smorgasbord
• The Dark Art of ShadowMapping
• DirectX 11 Technology Update

Wednesday, March 10th

• DirectX 11 DirectCompute–A Teraflop for Everyone
• Think DirectX 11 Tessellation! – Lots of options
• Developing Games for Windows Phone 7 Series*
• High Performance 3D Games on Windows Phone 7 Series*
• Development and Debugging Tools for Windows Phone 7 Series*
• Bringing the Best of Xbox LIVE to Windows Phone 7 Series*

  * These sessions are repeated during the main conference Thursday March 11^th through Saturday March 13^th.

MIX ‘10 (3/15 – 3/17)

Las Vegas more your style? Looking to learn more everything there is to know about the developer platform for Windows Phone 7 Series? MIX ‘10 March 15^th through March 17^th is the show for you!

MIX ‘10 has twelve (yes, 12!) sessions that cover developing applications and games for the Windows Phone 7 Series. If you’re interested in the platform and how to developer for this great new device MIX ‘10 is the place to be.

Hope to see you at the shows!

Traditionally Windows Mobile has had some great games, but not a really strong investment around game development and game design when it comes to a mobile platform. You’ve had technologies like GAPI and Managed Direct3D Mobile, but I feel more investment could be made to make partners successful and profitable as a game developer.

For myself, the introduction of Windows Phone 7 Series showing that Microsoft has taken a new approach to providing consumers a truly personal experience on a mobile device. As time goes on everyone on the Windows Phone and Xbox LIVE teams are working to make sure that you can leverage a powerful, productive and portable platform for your games.

I’m hoping that we’ll have some great conversations around game development and game design in a mobile form factor. So let’s start a dialog, whether it be on this blog or twitter (@mklucher). Pardon the pun, but this is a whole new game!

The last month of 2009 was a bit weird for me. I was out of the office for most of it due to some surgery I was having (more on that some other time) but December 2009 also marks the first month since we started shipping XNA Game Studio, known as XNA Game Studio Express at the time, that we haven’t shipped a new major version. So what is usually a very busy month getting everything ready to ship to customers, turned out to be a low-key month.

We haven’t been asleep at the wheel though, as I mentioned in my previous post we’ve been hard at work throughout all of 2009. Looking back we had a fair share of releases with XNA Game Studio 3.1 which had some great additional features and the XNA Game Studio 3.1 Zune Extensions for the Zune HD. The year also brought us several new team members, including Zach who is already a better game developer than I could ever be

Moving forward I think 2010 is going to be even better for XNA Game Studio users! 2010 is also starting off to be a really busy year for the team, take a look at some of the events we have lined up for you right around the corner!

• January through May we’ll be hosting our Developer Talk Series of Webcasts through http://creators.xna.com on various XNA Game Studio topics with several members of the XNA Development Platform team.
• February 10th and 11th(My B-Day!) we’ll be hosting Microsoft Gamefest 2010 with some great sessions on XNA Game Studio and other Microsoft game development technologies, including Project Natal!
• February 16th through February 19th is the Microsoft 2010 MVP Global Summit for both or existing and new XNA/DirectX MVP’s! Congratulations to everyone who was recently nominated or renewed!
• March 9th through March 13th marks GDC 2010. We don’t have our formal agenda set in stone yet but we’ll have plenty of sessions and other great stuff for you to enjoy!

That’s quite a few events to have planned out so early in the year. Of course these aren’t the only things we have planned for XNA Game Studio in 2010, we may have a few additional surprises up our sleeve! If nothing else you’ll learn at some point what my developer session topic will be as opposed to the ominous "TBD". While it’s busy, it’s also a productive way to kickoff the new year and I hope to see you at at least some of the events above!

On that note, here’s to a great 2009 and wishing all of you a happy and exciting 2010!

I also took the opportunity to move to IIS7 and the upgrade seems to have gone without a hitch. You’ll also find that all the posts were migrated over thanks to the great post over at JefTek. If you see any problems with them, please drop me a comment and let me know!

So what does this mean? I hope that 2010 will bring some more frequent postings from me  now that I can blog without trying to keep the site constantly running correctly or working around theme issues! The upgrade caused one minor shortfall in that if you use RSS to read my blog you’ll now want to point to http://klucher.com/feed as opposed to the old URL. I realize the irony in that those who only use RSS to read my blog may not see this for a while. If you do catch this please help spread the word, it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks and I’ll be posting more very soon!

All of us on the XNA Development Platform team are keeping busy as always. We’re working, thinking, dreaming, and the occasional viewing of pictures of Rhys in all types of interesting ways through the XNA Framework. It keeps me busy, so sometimes getting everything I want to write down falls to the backburner. If you have interesting topics that you’d like to hear about, drop me a line. Most of the time my silence on the blog is just because I’m not sure I have anything interesting to say!

One of the other things on my “blog to do” list is to try and get a decent theme running on my site, sadly this means that I also need to look at a new blogging platform as the support for GraffitiCMS has veered off a bit in the last year and there simply isn’t that much community support for it right now. I’m of course I’m trying to stick to the .NET platform so I’ve been keeping a close eye on Oxite and Atomsite. Oxite seems still pretty early in development, but looks really promising! Atomsite also looks a bit early in development but seems deployable and has a lot of neat features. The biggest blocker for me is that I’m not a CSS expert and there really aren’t any blogging themes available for either platform yet. Maybe I’ll spend some time putting something together, but without really good CSS knowledge I’ve been struggling at the simplest of tasks. If you have any ideas around this stuff, or maybe a great .NET blogging platform with a lot of themes available let me know!

Finally while these could easily be tweets there were a couple of random pieces of XNA Game Studio related news that was passed our way that I wanted to make sure everyone knew about:

• NxtGenUG (A UK based XNA user group) is holding a “NxtGenUG XNA Day” event for £10 that includes a day of sessions built around game development in XNA Game Studio. Find out all the details here: http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=246
• Don’t forget that Gamefest 2010 is going to be here faster than you think! Head to http://www.xnagamefest.com/ where you can sign up to be notified when we start the registration process!

Again, Shoot me your ideas, questions, etc and give me something to write about. It’s a great way to pass the time and be productive!

Last weekend I took a trip by my local bookstore and found that Jim Perry’s latest book: “RPG Programming Using XNA Game Studio 3.0” is shipping and most likely on the shelf of your local bookseller as it was at mine.

The book’s release is pretty special for me in that Jim was kind enough to ask me to write the forward. If you take a look at the cover it’s called out at the bottom, which is something pretty incredible. No don’t worry, I don’t have any delusions of grandeur about my role in the process and it’s only a page or two worth of text but the fact that I got to be involved at any level with a published book is amazing and something I’ll keep with me for a long time.

Back to the real stars of this post though: Jim and the book. If you’ve been interested in programming RPG games (Who isn’t!?) and/or also learning about XNA Game Studio, give the book a read, or you can view the Table of Contents if you want more info. One of the things I really liked about the concept when I first heard about it is using something genre specific to teach users XNA Game Studio. That way if you’re really into RPG’s you can use this as a great way to learn XNA Game Studio and work on something that will keep you interested all at the same time! I really think it’s a successful methodology.

I hope you enjoy the book and of course the forward too!

Once XNA Game Studio 3.1 has been released (if you’re anxiously waiting, make sure to keep an eye here, here, and of course here) the next time you run the 3.0 version of XNA Game Studio Connect you’ll receive a Title Update which will disable that version. It will also instruct you on how to upgrade by deleting and re-downloading the program from Xbox LIVE. When you run the old release from then on you’ll see screenshot below:

 
You don’t need to run the old version and download the Title Update once 3.1 is available, you can just delete the old version of XNA Game Studio Connect and download the new one. Need some help doing that? Simply follow the instructions I’ve included below!

Step 1: Delete the Old XNA Game Studio Connect

First, you’ll want to remove the old XNA Game Studio Connect from your Xbox 360 console. If you don’t, it may try to start when running a game, which would then tell you that you need to upgrade—even if you already have the new version on your console.

1. On your Xbox 360 console, navigate to the Games Library and then select Community Games.
2. Select XNA Game Studio Connect from the list of games. From there, select Delete Game. You do not need to delete any of your games.

Step 2: Re-download the New XNA Game Studio Connect

Now it’s time to get the new XNA Game Studio Connect. To do this, follow the process you used to download it the first time, described below.

1. On your Xbox 360 console, navigate to Game Marketplace, then select All Games.
2. Select XNA Creators Club, and then select XNA Game Studio Connect. You should see the option to Download Again. Select it, and wait for the download to complete.

That’s all there was to it! You’re now ready to use XNA Game Studio 3.1 with your Xbox 360! If you have any trouble please stop by our XNA Creators Club forums and let us know!

The site is currently looking to grow by adding new features as well as keep the contests going at a steady pace with some great, attractive prizes. With those goals in mind, Ziggyware is currently holding a donation drive to help cover some of the costs of running the site and contests. If you’ve found the site to be useful stop by today and learn more about how you can help from this link. While visiting make sure to check out the latest round of contest winning tutorials and brush up your game programming knowledge a bit!