Community Games Now Indie Games

[AzBat]

As part of the XNA Game Studio 3.1 announcement today Microsoft announced that they're renaming the Community Games channel to Indie Games.

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/news/xnagamestudio3.1

Here's the rest of the list changes coming to XNA Game Studio 3.1...

• Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.
• Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.
• Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:
  
  [*]Full screen video playback
  [*]Video playback to simple textures in game
  [*]Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
  [*]Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
  [*]Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
  [*]Play back multiple video streams at the same time​
• Audio API: 3.1 has a new usage pattern of SoundEffect.Play. Sound instances created by Play calls are disposed automatically when playback ends, and SoundEffect.Play returns a Boolean to indicate success or failure.
• Content Pipeline Enhancements: improvements making it much easier to add customer types (custom attributes for run-time of an object and run-time type version of an object, and the ability to determine if deserialization into an existing object is possible).
• XACT3 Support: includes support for XACT3 with new features including the ability to enable a filter on every track, and support for the xWMA compression format.
• Visual Studio Changes: XNA Game Studio 3.1 supports both 3.0 and 3.1 projects, and it includes support for upgrading projects from 3.0 to 3.1.[/

 

[RobertR1]

I'm looking forward to the "fall update" that will allow ratings. There's getting to be too much content on Live to explore so a rating system would be good to try out various games.

 

[AzBat]

I'm looking forward to the "fall update" that will allow ratings. There's getting to be too much content on Live to explore so a rating system would be good to try out various games.

Agreed. User ratings will probably be more helpful than changing the Community Games to Indie Games.

Tommy McClain

 

[Malibu]

IGN

Pricing has been given a total overhaul, better reflecting the size and complexity of the game. Game prices now start at 80 MS Points for games less than 50MB in size. Games that currently cost 800 points will stay that way, but all new releases will have their maximum price capped at 400 Points. Other price changes will be rolled out by late October affecting current and new releases.

All game creators now have 'Reputation', affecting their rank and rating within XNA Creators Club. To aid sites like IGN, developers can now send media outlets 'Tokens' to download copies of their indie games. Handy!

Finally, Japan and Germany can begin to submit their independent creations to the service. Germany will have access to the service from August 11, 2009.

 

[AzBat]

Thanks for the post. Saved me from doing it myself. I really like the new pricing tier. Nice to have really cheap $1 games/apps!

Oh just found a few more new things...

•Creators can now submit their Indie Games into Japanese, German, Singapore and Swedish Xbox LIVE Marketplaces. So if you’re a consumer in Japan, Germany, Singapore, or Sweden, you can look forward to getting access to all these great games with the next dashboard update.
•Update notifications! Finally you will get a nice prompt when starting an Xbox LIVE Indie Game if that game has an update. Then you can do a quick update and know you have the latest version.

http://xboxindies.com/2009/07/xbox-live-indie-games-transition-has-begun/

Tommy McClain

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Oooh, submissions from Japan? That should be interesting.

Regards,
SB

 

[AzBat]

Oooh, submissions from Japan? That should be interesting.

Regards,
SB

Yeah, they're already hitting the marketplace...

http://xboxindies.com/game/nakfiv-R0v
http://xboxindies.com/game/nakfiv-WYC

Tommy McClain