Community Games on Xbox LIVE Beta

Game development has been democratized as the newly designed XNA Creators Club Online Web site and the highly anticipated beta of Community Games on Xbox LIVE are launched. This was announced by David "LetsKillDave" Weller Program Manager - XNA Community .

Here are some of the excerpts :

If you’re a already a premium member, you will be able to join us in the Community Games on Xbox LIVE Beta immediately, where you can submit your games and review others games, and enjoy playing them on Xbox LIVE! If you are not a member, sign up today and get involved in making game development history.

This effort represents, quite literally, several developer-years of work.

Here are a few cool things we encourage you to check out:

1)      The Quick Start Guide will take you on a tour of all the features of the new site plus a guided tour of how the community games distribution pipeline works.

2)      The new Education Content Catalog lets you find content quickly by type or development area

3)      The new Role Playing Game Starter Kit – sure to stimulate your need for creating your own “old school” RPG-style game

4)      The new Community Spotlight area, featuring interviews and articles from amazing community contributors (and sometimes a “celebrity interview”)

We encourage you, no matter what your game development expertise, to visit the new XNA Creators Club Online Web site, at http://creators.xna.com, to see the new changes for yourself!

Though I don't have a XBox , still the news is very exciting.

For full details read: XNA Team Blog

How to deploy an XNA game to your Zune

Recently XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP has been released as I had posted earlier about it that using this version you can develop games for Zune. And many of you must have already downloaded it and trying to develop games for your Zune. But many of you may not know or might not have yet coded the games for your Zune. So not to worry, now there are many games being made available on net developed by enthusiasts and developers. So you can get those games and can deploy it to your Zune. But how to do it?

Here's a nice step by step video by Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist Dan Waters where he demos what is required and how to deploy an XNA game to your Zune. Also check out a pong like game he provides for download which you can deploy it on our Zune. Thanks Dan !

Video: XNA on the Zune: A Brief How-To

Downloads:

Source code for Pong like game.Source Code (zip, 83 KB)
The above shown Video (wmv, 35.6 MB)

(source:XNA Games on the Zune - A Brief "How To")

Please remember XNA game Studio is a CTP version and should not be deployed on your production machine. Try at your own risk and enjoy developing, deploying and playing games on your Zune!

Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP released

Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP is out today, you can get it from here. With this version you can develop games for Zune.

Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition or Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition or higher is required to install and run the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP. This current CTP does not enable Xbox 360 game development.  Only Windows and Zune are supported in this CTP.It will be supported in the final release version.This CTP doesn't work in 64 bit yet.

Check the download link for more details related to hardware requirement. Check http://creators.xna.com/ for samples, tutorials , screencasts to get started. Give it a try, try creating a game for your Zune.

Check the XNA Team Blog for the latest info.