SPACEWAR WARM-UP CHALLENGE WINNERS!

Five games have been chosen by the jury, and the winners are listed here. You can also see some in-game screenshots for each.

Congrats to the winners!

[BTW, do you have links to builds of any of the winning games? Then feel free to post them here.]

UPDATE: OFFICIAL WORDS ABOUT D.B.P. COMPO

Have you read my previous post? If you did, my apologies. If not, don't!

I should have checked any news on my RSS-feeds subscriptions earlier ... that's why the name of this site: "Do as I say, not as I do ..." (I'm not going to delete it to live in the shadows of shame as ways of auto-punishment; now where is my "dumb" cone-hat?).

Anyway ...

The XNA Team has informed in its latest blog's post three relevant things:

1. XNA Creators Club Online community site is open for business,
2. Dream-Build-Play's "main" competition has gone live, and
3. New partnerships and exclusive benefits for XNA Creators Club Premium members.

The community site is a great place to start with XNA since it offers a growing set of educational tutos, starter kits, samples and so on.

D.B.P.'s main competition is the dream came true for any indie developer that was/is willing to make it into the pro leagues: "The Perfect Compo".

Last but not least, the new benefits that "premium" members will enjoy are great: SOFTIMAGE/XSI Mod Tool, TorqueX Engine, Allegorithmic ProFX, among others.

So, go ahead and read this post, for the complete information.

Happy coding! ;)

A SNEAK PEEK ON D.B.P.'S PRIZES

Well yes, I couldn't find any official word and link (yet) detailing the prizes for the main DBP compo (other than what has been published in the OXM), but TehOne.com has posted the following:

"Dream-Build-Play’s main competition has gone live. Fame, fortune and a chance at global envy await you in our Dream-Build-Play competition. The grand prize is a $10,000, an awesome Alienware PC with a smokin’ fast AMD FX processor and ATI graphics card, 3D modeling software, Xbox 360, XNA Creators Club subscription tokens and an amazingly cool Xbox Live Arcade publishing contract for your chance to get your game published on Xbox Live Arcade. Do you have what it takes to win all that and more? Then get started on making your dream game using XNA Game Studio Express and head on over to http://www.dreambuildplay.com/ to enter it into the contest."

Quite interesting ... now we only have to wait for someone in the XNA Team to confirm whether "the cat is out of the bag" or not.

In the meantime, hands on our respective XNA projects!

XNA GAMES ARTICLE ON OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE

According to this thread on the XNA GSE forum, this month's issue of the "Official XBOX Magazine" includes "write-ups" (with screenshots) of the following games: "iFactor", "Eternity's Child", "Racing Game", "Wildboarders", and "Last Alarm : The A.R.G.U.S Complex".

What is more, the issue give further detail about the next phase of the D.B.P. contest, like a list with the prizes!

For those of us not subscribed to this magazine (for whatever reason), there's a comment left by David Weller on the above-mentioned thread that will make us stay tuned for news: "Ask me again on Monday ...".

Ok, Monday ... now let's stay tuned for news!

REMEMBER 'BLADE3D'?

And no, I'm not referring to a 3D representation of the Marvel's hero.

I mean this upcoming XNA-based framework. Today, Zyggy has informed us that the first open beta is now available for testing.

Check out this screenshot:

Worth testing, imho ...

[Note: in order to receive the beta you must register here.]

"GETTING STARTED"

We have a new member that a couple of days ago decided to join the ring of XNA bloggers: "TehOne.com".

Eric has kicked off with a couple of posts with source code:

• Enabling-Disabling GameComponents when a game is Activated-Deactivated, and
• Framerate GameComponent.

C'mon, let's all say hello to Eric and welcome!

"THEZBUFFER" IS NOT OVER!

"TheZBuffer is not to be considered dead until I say so", the Zman said. Thus, this is throwing away any speculation over the IRC.

Not a believer? Just browse to TheZBuffer's site and read all the avalanch of new posts published these last days.

There's an interesting read about the future of managed code and DirectX, plus a whole summary of posts, entries and articles regarding threading in games.

Also you may find a link to a discussion of Home Brew Platforms at Pensive Gamer - XNA's competition ("Barriers and Predictions").

Happy read!

"BULLET HELL TACTICS" ENTERS A LARGE COMPO

Yes, Kobingo's has announced that "Bullet Hell Tactics" game will join this year's Swedish Game Awards compo -Sweden's largest game development competition.

So, good luck!

XNA MATRIX'S ENTRY TO THE WARM-UP CHALLENGE

Yes, Will has revealed a teaser of his entry to the warm-up chalenge. So repeating his words, "If anybody is curious" just browse to this link to see a two-days old screenshot of the game.

Peronally, I have been working on my entry for only 3 days now from scratch, so I don't think I get it on time, but no matter what, I'll post my version of the Spacewar game when finished.

Cheers!

XNATUTORIAL.COM: WEEKLY UPDATE

The guys from XNAtutorial.com have published their Weekly Update summary of XNA announcements, workarounds, source code, reads and so on.

Quite helpful contribution, don't you think?

Enjoy!

UPDATE: SHARKY'S 'AIR LEGENDS'

Lawrence has released a new build of the 'Air Legends' game.

Among the new features we will find music, collision detection optimization, and a fix to the screenshot-saving functionality.

Also, now everything is packed and delivered in a single installation file (created using "Wix").

So, where shall I download the build from? Impatient, ugh? Just go to this page and grab it form there.

See ya.

BENJAMIN NITSCHKE'S NEW BLOG

Benny's back! Yeap, it's true ... he has given his blog a new look plus he plans to post more often.

From his blog: "Well, I was posting less and less on this blog and this gonna change now. From now on I will try to post often, maybe even daily. The blog posts will not be as long as before, I will just talk about what's on my mind each day. Initially this blog was started as a little diary for me and I will return to that initial idea."

In addition to his projects, Benjamin plans to comment on FxCop stuff, CgFX, using Collada in XNA, and so on.

Welcome back!

GAME MAKER STUDIO .NET

A new framework built on top of XNA has arrived: 'Game Maker Studio .NET'.

You can check the author's blog, visit the forums, view some screenshots, browse the Wiki and of course, download the latest version of the framework.

From GMS .NET's site: "Through working with RMXP building scripts and seeing the limits of the engine I left RMXP to build a new editor and engine. I had an idea for a good system for building 2d games or at least 2d RPG games. So I asked around and found people willing to help with the project. But sadly they have all left one way or another. That forced me to rethink the development since I was depending on some of these people for different parts of development. I changed the direction of the project and went away from ruby as my programming language and away from developing an in-house graphics package and maybe from a graphics package all together. When this process was working itself out I found the XNA framework the brain child from MS for a simple and easy way to develop games. Well in truth it does make life a lot simpler in terms of lower level control but lacks a great deal of higher level control and content control. The idea struck. Build an editor to layer over the XNA framework. But the hard part was how to do it away that lets the user and community develop the product’s future. So I designed a shell in which new elements can be added to a project and thus changing the editor the engines and the game. Thus through community development this product can be changed to model the needs of the community. It was at this point that Game Maker Studio .Net was born and The Game Wizard died."
Enjoy!

'BULLET HELL TACTICS' BETA 1 ANNOUNCED

Remember this awesome game?

Well, the author's has announced that beta 1 is planned for next March, so stay tunned to his site.

NEW NAME TO XNA MAGIC: 'BLADE3D'

At last! The new name for XNA Magic framework has been announced: Blade3D.

So don't forget to update your favorites with the new link.

Congrats to the winner!

CHECK OUT ZIGGYWARE'S WEBLINKS

Hi, everybody! After a couple of days off I'm back on track with my "coding stamina" up high again ... :)

Checking Ziggyware's rss feed I've found plenty of news posted this last "long" weekend.

Also, pay a visit to Ziggy's Weblinks -which are grouped by categories- where you'll find lots of links to interesting sites related to XNA.

Later ...

XNATUTORIAL.COM: WEEKLY UPDATE

The guys from XNAtutorial.com have published their Weekly Update summary of XNA announcements, workarounds, source code, reads and so on.

Very interesting and handy as usual.

Enjoy!

FRANK MILLER'S 300

The second trailer of this amazing movie has been released.

After watching the trailer, it's becoming more and more clear to me that in the future, at least for certain kind of films, companies will only look for voices to produce movies. What do you think?

XNATUTORIAL.COM: WEEKLY UPDATE

The guys from XNAtutorial.com have published their Weekly Update summary of XNA announcements, workarounds, code, games, teasers, and reads.

It's amazing how fast the XNA community is growing: new blogs have been published (and old ones now include sections which focus on XNA), plenty of interesting games are being developed, and more and more video trailers are being released (most of the latter can be found on this site).

Enjoy!

DREAM.BUILD.PLAY CONTEST IS COMING

You don't believe it, read this post on the XNA Team Blog.

"... The specific timeframes will be announced soon but I can say that everyone will have ample time to design, develop and polish their games. After all, we're not after samples here... we're looking for the next blockbuster game that's lurking in your dreams! ..."

Say again please .... THE NEXT BLOCKBUSTER ... I love this part ... ;)