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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Last week Microsoft announced the winners of its 2008 Dream-Build-Play game development contest. The indie devs took home more than $US70,000 in cash and prizes, and “will have the opportunity to receive an invitation to publish their games on Xbox LIVE Arcade.” Microsoft’s words, not mine. There probably is some legal stuff that has to happen and they can’t just say straight out you’ll be able to play these on Xbox Community Games, when the new Live goes up Nov. 19.
File under Curious. The Unfinished Swan, an XNA project from indie coder Ian Dallas, is a novel take on the FPS genre, set in an entirely colourless world.
Several readers have emailed us to let us know that two games have appeared on Xbox Live under the XNA Creator’s Club banner. A space shooter called Net Rumble and a letters game called Netters are both available for download as we speak, as I just verified, in both free demo and full versions priced at 100 Microsoft Points a pop. Unfortunately we’ve also verified that the two titles seem unplayable to the average users, with XNA Creator’s Club launcher errors popping up even if you have the program installed. I suppose I’ll just let them sit there on my hard disk until I figure out what to do with them. Lovely.
London-based indie studio Beatnik Games have released a trailer for their debut title – Plain Sight.
Plain Sight is a multiplayer action title for PC and Xbox 360. Players control cute little robot skeletons that fly around a stylized environment and hit each other with swords to amass points. To ‘bank’ your points, you must blow yourself up – taking out as many of your rivals as possible.
Yes, it is essentially a game about suicide bombing robots. But it’s ok – they are cute! And the background looks a bit like Tron, which can’t be bad.
This is Owlboy. It’s a game from D-pad Studio. This is their description of the game:
Owl Boy is a 2D platforming adventure for the Xbox 360 and Windows PCs. Go with Otus on a free flying quest into the clouds and discover the secrets of the floating islands while preserving the Owls’ integrity…
Pretty much sums it up. Good news is it looks pretty great! Better news is it’s being entered into the IGF, so hopefully it can pick up a little more exposure while it’s there.
Microsoft’s recent announcement that it would let community developers earn money for games they make with the company’s XNA toolset came as good news to some, but former XNA community manager David Weller is concerned about the lack of quality standards. On his blog, Weller wrote:
Being an ex-XNA member, I can still say, without a shadow of doubt, that Microsoft is offering a groundbreaking game channel, and that some people stand a chance to make great money from the system. It’s an exciting opportunity, but the danger for consumers lies in Microsoft’s deliberate steps to avoid discussions regarding game quality, even during peer review.
Yeah! Homebrew Xbox 360 games made by XNA Creators Club members on Xbox Live! Sounds radical. Neat even. Shame Australia won’t be getting it at launch. From the XNA website:
In which regions will Xbox LIVE Community Games be available when it launches this holiday? Consumers in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain will be able to download Xbox LIVE Community Games at launch. We’ll be adding support for other regions later in 2009 and beyond.
Well, that’s a bit crappy, isn’t it? We pinged Microsoft’s local presence about the issue, and it was unable to provide a reason for the delay or an exact date.
[Thanks Dominic]
Now, just about anyone can be a game developer — and get paid for it, too. At its Gamefest 2008 event today, Microsoft announced that community games made using its XNA tools will be downloadable via either PC or Xbox 360, and that the creators will get 70 percent of the revenues, as we reported earlier today.
We spoke to game developers’ group general manager Chris Satchell about the new community initiative. “We realised there was so much creativity out there in the community”, he said. “So many people had great ideas, so we needed to give them a toolset to express themselves… and then we had to give them that worldwide stage where they could show it. And then the final step is, why not let them benefit from it?”
Microsoft saw, Satchell said, that incredible innovation came from viral communities of indie game designers across the web, and hoped to capture some of that community for its users. Satchell hopes that community games will become viral in the same way:
Back in February Xbox 360 gamers got a chance to try out some of the exciting homebrew games coming out of the XNA Code Creators Club, and this holiday season they’ll be able to buy them. Microsoft has dropped details about how pricing and payments will work for folks who have their games published via the new program, now called Xbox LIVE Community Games. Paying members of the Creators Club will be able to submit their games to the community for peer review, and if they deem it worthy they’ll be able to set a price and put it up for sale.
