Xbox Live Indie Games... definitive thread

[AzBat]

Community Games are starting to come into their own. I'd like to use this thread for people to talk about only the best games on the service. Ones that totally warrant their purchase & match or exceed Arcade and/or disc games.

So far in my experience I've probably downloaded & tried 90% of the games available on the service. Of the 203 games currently available, I believe Miner Dig Deep to be one of the best(if not the best) games on the service. It by far has the most addictive gameplay & the absolute best value of any game on the service at 200 MS Points. I totally recommend this game without hesitation. Download it & see how deep you can go. You'll be totally hooked!

Tommy McClain

 

[makattack]

Just found this interesting video roundup of the top 10 XNA Community Games:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcirGnJv64w

I will have to check out Miner Dig Deep...

 

[AzBat]

Just found this interesting video roundup of the top 10 XNA Community Games:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcirGnJv64w

I will have to check out Miner Dig Deep...

Thanks for the heads up! I bet nobody can guess what their #1 XNA title is. Anyway, you can also check out www.xnaroundup.com to get links to iTunes, Twitter or RSS feeds.

Tommy McClain

 

[Deepblue]

Carneyvale Showtime is one you need to take a look at. Fantastic art and graphics, fun balloon-popping gameplay, and a fully featured level creator.

 

[AzBat]

There is a recurring theme of "Players 1" in that list, which is a shame.

Considering the tools they give you(or lack thereof) to do online multiplayer I'm not surprised. These developers need to learn to walk before they can run. So give it some time. I'm sure great multiplayer games will get here soon enough.

Tommy McClain

 

[AzBat]

Carneyvale Showtime is one you need to take a look at. Fantastic art and graphics, fun balloon-popping gameplay, and a fully featured level creator.

I've played the demo, but didn't know about the level creator. Sounds neat. Didn't it win some kind of award?

Tommy McClain

 

[makattack]

Considering the tools they give you(or lack thereof) to do online multiplayer I'm not surprised. These developers need to learn to walk before they can run. So give it some time. I'm sure great multiplayer games will get here soon enough.

Tommy McClain

Improvements / more XBL support coming:

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/news/dbpandxnags31

Additionally, Creators will be happy to hear about our improvements to the XNA Game Studio development tools, available to professional and hobbyist developers this spring, which will allow developers at any level to take advantage of new partner additions and Xbox LIVE features. Community Games developers will be able to include customized Avatars, which have quickly become one of the most popular features on Xbox LIVE. We'll have many more details about XNA Game Studio 3.1 soon!

The XNA Game Studio update, which will also include improvements like video playback and new audio APIs, means that Community Games featuring Avatars start appearing on Xbox LIVE as early as this fall!

I'm a little worried about all this focus they have ok Kodu -- a sort of "Game Construction Set" type of app. I don't know of a single one that has succeeded. It sort of seems to be designed to bridge the gap between a full on SDK like XNA Studio and games customization features like end-user maps, etc. Anyway, I think the general population just won't get it...

 

[Graham]

I think XNA is finally starting to hit critical mass.

The service has broken 200 games (211 to be precise, with another 50 in review), and importantly stats are starting to come out for how much money the games are making.

I think this is the important bit - I've always expected XNA to be a good service for PC / web casual game developers to quickly port their titles, yet this hasn't really happened. I'm wondering if this has simply been due to lack of financial certainty.

Perhaps the most important bit from the PR was the following:

Several Community Games top sellers will be taking home more income from four months of sales than the average U.S. citizen earns in a full year.

They have to be intentionally vague - but read into it and it's a fair assumption that a popular game could well earn 'more income' than 3x ~43,000.. So more than $130,000 / year after tax and Microsoft's cut. With a good long tail too, and an expanding market.

So I think conditions are ripe for the platform to gain some more traction, as it's fair to say it's been overshadowed by the iPhone appstore.

I've certainly seen a fairly significant increase in visitors to my own project, which is a 'thin' graphics api that sits atop XNA. I'm seeing close to 200 downloads a week, which is a hell of a lot more than a month or two ago.
There is also at least one indy studio using parts of it, for a full retail XNA title (and, I assume, community game).

Interesting times.

 

[BadTB25]

Can you elaborate on your graphics API?

 

[Deepblue]

Tried a few more last night. TV Calibration works well as advertised, and Solar is a fantastic game to relax with.

 

[Graham]

Can you elaborate on your graphics API?

Ok, a bit of a rant incomming...

Basically xen is my attempt to build a minimalist and clean api atop xna, doing as best I can to reduce errors and do things like reduce redundant API calls (without draw reordering).

There are certain parts of XNA which are, frankly, hideous - usually the bits which are direct wrappers on their DirectX counterparts.

The annoying thing is, here is an API in a totally different language (C# to C++) yet it's almost a literal translation an aging API. XNA makes very few attempts to really take advantage of the .net runtime and language to clean up the API.

And the areas where it does try and abstract things sometimes have ended up screwing up in some way. For example, they abstracted out BeginScene/EndScene in XNA 1.1, which caused all sorts of problems where doing things in certain orders would screw up (eg, creating resources within a BeginScene block).

It's like the API is fighting two wars, one to be 'Managed DirectX 3' and one to be a high level API for beginners. The result is a nasty mix of the two, where both make compromises to each other - and neither truly manages it's goal.

Two examples of this:
They have SpriteBatches, which are instanced 2D sprites. Great for beginners!, expect they change render state in unexpected and undocumented ways (eg, texture clamping) which cause all sorts of pain for newbies. The solution; opt-in wrap them in a StateBlock, which are *horribly* inefficient as they store the entire render state (right down to shader constants). In which case their performance tanks.

Another really simple example is Matrix.CreateLookAt(). Obvious? no. XNA has no concept of a camera, and nothing built in to manage world matrices, etc. So... CreateLookAt() inverts the matrix it returns, because they have assumed most people will use it for a camera.. But there is no concept of a camera, so it 'has' to return a view matrix. A really simple example of a bad decision to 'help' which ends up causing more trouble.

Using things like HLSL Effects are somehow even worse, and vertex declarations are simply heinous .
These are things I've tried to improve. Eg, I totally replace Effects, and use reflection to generate vertex declarations.

I'm not saying XNA is a disaster. It's far from it. It's still very, very good.
It's just a shame because it had ridiculous potential to be something totally amazing. Whereas it's more like a new coat of paint on a slightly rusty hull.

 

[BadTB25]

Thanks for taking the time to elaborate.

Admittedly, it mostly over my head. I just started taking programming classes and have bookmarked the site you linked. Hopefully, in a few months it will make more sense to me.

I was mostly interested because if I ever get any free time, I would like to try my hand at seeing what I can do with XNA. Any tools that are useful would of course be of interest.

Any chance of the latest XNA revision cleaning up some of the issues you mentioned?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I think XNA is finally starting to hit critical mass.

The service has broken 200 games (211 to be precise, with another 50 in review), and importantly stats are starting to come out for how much money the games are making.

I think this is the important bit - I've always expected XNA to be a good service for PC / web casual game developers to quickly port their titles, yet this hasn't really happened. I'm wondering if this has simply been due to lack of financial certainty.

Perhaps the most important bit from the PR was the following:



They have to be intentionally vague - but read into it and it's a fair assumption that a popular game could well earn 'more income' than 3x ~43,000.. So more than $130,000 / year after tax and Microsoft's cut. With a good long tail too, and an expanding market.

So I think conditions are ripe for the platform to gain some more traction, as it's fair to say it's been overshadowed by the iPhone appstore.

I've certainly seen a fairly significant increase in visitors to my own project, which is a 'thin' graphics api that sits atop XNA. I'm seeing close to 200 downloads a week, which is a hell of a lot more than a month or two ago.
There is also at least one indy studio using parts of it, for a full retail XNA title (and, I assume, community game).

Interesting times.

Wow, that's pretty cool. It's nice to see that there's a place where indy/beginning devs can try things out and even make a profit and prosper.

In some ways it reminds me of the earlier days of PC gaming. When Carmack was doing Duke Nukem and Tim Sweeney was doing Jill of the Jungle. And even before all those when Richard Garriot was doing Akalabeth for example.

It makes me wonder if somewhere in there is the next Carmack, or Tim Sweeney...

Regards,
SB

 

[AzBat]

Tried a few more last night. TV Calibration works well as advertised, and Solar is a fantastic game to relax with.

Yeah, I just bought Solar tonight too. Kinda caught me by surprise. I ended buying it right after I finished the trial. It's great, but I'm not sure I'd put it at the top. Son likes & it was well worth the 200 MS Points.

Tommy McClain

 

[Graham]

From the xna forums: Solar has sold 1466 copies in the 6 days it's been up. Which puts it a little under $3,000 USD.
So certainly not on par with the appstore madness, but I think it shows a well made game can make good money.

It's interesting seeing some actual numbers come in. What is clear, is that peeking peoples interest has a big impact on the download rate. Polish is important, but most significantly, games that don't manage their trials well - giving little incentive - are selling very poorly. (surprise!)

I'm very curious to know how well Easy Golf has done.

 

[toroin]

Battle Havoc is a great one, but it needs more people to buy it so we can play online more. XNA Roundup just reviewed it today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDSD86Y5-6s

 

[Sc4freak]

I got the impression that most people weren't as happy with the numbers as they would have liked. Solar was one of the few exceptions, and probably due to good marketing.

Having had only very recently had my game approved, I'm not very hopeful about the number of sales I can generate. From what I can gather, even games which are high on the popularity list only generate a few hundred dollars in revenue.

XLCG seems to be overflowing with games (and in some cases, "games") that are, frankly, pretty bad.

 

[Graham]

I got the impression that most people weren't as happy with the numbers as they would have liked. Solar was one of the few exceptions, and probably due to good marketing.

True, to a point.

I think a lot of people just assumed that if you dump a game on the service it'll sell itself - people would 'get' it, and it'd market itself.
That loads of people saw enormous sales drop offs when microsoft boosted the trial timer from 4 to 8 minutes is pretty telling I think. Sometimes 95%+ drop offs.

If you look at a the games in question - the ones where the authors are unhappy with the sales - you can usually see a lack of marketing, approachability and upselling.

There was one example, a space fighting game... It had a name which gave no hint at all to what the game was - and a box image, which while pretty, didn't help either. The game laked an upsell and even the trailer almost felt arrogant - clearly made by someone so deeply involved in the game they'd made it under the assumption the viewer knew what the game even was.
It sold poorly. Despite the fact the game was decent. It's understandable the aurhor was upset, the problem was they couldn't see the problems in their own game's presentation.

Battle Havoc is a great one, but it needs more people to buy it so we can play online more. XNA Roundup just reviewed it today:

Welcome to Beyond3d

 

[AzBat]

Great points Graham! I think also there's also a consensus among gamers & developers alike that Microsoft hasn't done enough to tell the public about CG in general. It's really buried in the dashboard. Community Games scream for user ratings & until that happens I don't think they will generate much more sales.

Tommy McClain

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think a lot of people just assumed that if you dump a game on the service it'll sell itself - people would 'get' it, and it'd market itself.

The great e-commerce fallacy. If creating to make money, you have to know your market, what they want, give it to them and tell them you're selling it. Anyone entering into XNA to write their ultimate game they've always wanted could well be surprised by how everyone else doesn't get it and isn't interested. LBP offers a wonderfully low-cost introduction to this experience! Create an original level that deviates a lot from the norm and you may find the public unreceptive. It's this principal that retards a lot of originality in mainstream games. At the end of the day, the market isn't particularly receptive to new ideas. If you want to sell something new, you need to educate the masses to it, and convince them they'll like it.