James Wynn

Not that its news, but XNA along with a membership to the XNA Creators Club allows developers to create games in a unified system for both Windows and XBox 360. Although XNA uses C#, which I personally had reservations against, it is actually quite easy to develop on and even fun to use. XNA has now abated these reservations about C# and has persuaded me to try to port my project to the 360.

With sound, networking, a solid widely used gamepad interface, and excellent graphics capabilities the XNA platform seems ideal for small games development. The only reservations still present are against the relative immaturity of the community (as opposed to Ogre’s which is superb) and the lack of distribution mechanisms. The distribution problem is slated to be resolved with a rating system within the developer community, but this just comes back to the other problem.

There is, still, a significant amount of community generated content for learning and using XNA, but I worry about the platform if it does not attract a higher concentration of mature developers. We shall see.

The Feb ‘05 edition of Game Developer Magazine had an article titled “Late-Binding Data” and described an extremely useful mechanism for automatically reloading data into a game engine dynamically when the data has been changed.  It detects when a file has been updated and repopulates the data throughout the system.  So, an image/model can be exported from some other program and the results will be immediately visible in the game. No reloading!

This sounds like a huge time saver in the long run, but right now its turning into a significant time sink.  I figure if this functionality would be useful in my personal project, it would likely be valuable to others as well, so I’m going to try to integrate it into Ogre.  Should also prove a useful exercise in using Ogre as well.

So, I attended the Game Developer’s Conference 2007 in San Fransisco. Was a rather good time. Hanging out with tons of people who love making games, playing games, and drinking. It hadn’t occurred to me that game developers would be notorious binge drinkers, but it really makes since after some thinking. After all the sessions ended, if everyone didn’t go to an after-party to get smashed on free booze, we just wandered around the expo center and pillaged the free beer from the studios/vendors.  A good time was had by all.

I shook the hand of the man who invented Tetris, saw Shigeru Miyamoto talk about Mario, and Eiji Aonuma talk about Zelda (both of these talks were nothing less than spectacular), and met the directors/developers of many studios who make some of my favorite games.  Most of the vendors/studios were giving out tons of swag; picked up numerous t-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc.  One of the things I got was a free copy of Madden 2007, which I will rant about later.

After talking to many recruiters and other developers I’m feeling much more marketable now.  Not necessarily in comparison to them, but in comparison to what they are looking for.  It really puts the industry in to a slightly more friendly and tractable perspective.

In short, the conference was an absolute blast. Will definitely have to make it a habit.

Apparently I totally missed this little pile of gold. Nobody’s Watching’s premise is not quite as amazing as the effect it has had. It’s a sit-com mocking a reality tv show where two guys from Ohio are making a sit-com. It’s freakishly funny and produced by Bill Lawrence of Scrubs, with two actors who worked on Family Guy. Sadly it hasn’t really gone anywhere and it looks like it may not. If they don’t get picked up I hope they can still manage some sort of internet distribution. If they scaled it back a bit, they may be able to have the first really good internet syndicated sit-com.

They’ve also done a few other small videos just to keep people watching. Here’s the pilot (part 1, part 2, part 3), a Mentos and Coke skit, ‘Til Death’ (abridged), and a bit from the Emmys.

As I mentioned above, the effect this show has had is also quite interesting. It shows (yet again) that the internet can be harnessed in ways that has not occured to the industry. Distributing Pilots for show over the internet so that the audience can actually say what it likes, as opposed to showing whatever the studios think we want to see.

Goodluck Nobodys Watching, can’t wait to see more of your stuff.