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MS offers deals to four XNA devs

By Brendan Sinclair, GameSpotPosted Aug 13, 2007 12:11 pm PT

Two winners and two runners-up of Dream-Build-Play indie Xbox 360 development contest offered chance to publish their games on Live Arcade.

Blazing Birds shared top honors with Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.

In March, Microsoft began accepting submissions for its Dream-Build-Play promotion, a contest that challenged independent developers to create their own Xbox 360 games using the XNA Game Studio software. The winner of first prize was to receive a prize package including an Xbox Live Arcade publishing contract.

Microsoft today announced the results of the Dream-Build-Play contest at its Gamefest 2007 Game Technology Conference, and the publishing giant is actually doling out not one, but four separate contracts to developers of submitted games. The company said more than 4,500 people from more than 100 countries enrolled in the contest, and the number of quality entrants was such that four contestants would be given the opportunity to publish their games on Xbox Live Arcade.

The cowinners of the contest were Blazing Birds by David Flook of Burlington, Ontario, Canada, and The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai by James Silva of Marcy, New York. Flook's Blazing Birds is a futuristic 2D twist on badminton, with robotic spheres hurling power shots at one another across a neon net. The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is a side-scrolling action game featuring over-the-top violence and a main character that uses an array of blades and guns to mow down adversaries.

The runners-up were Gravitron Ultra from Steve Olofsson of Stockholm, Sweden, and Yo Ho Kablammo! by Daniel McGuire of Huddersfield, UK. Gravitron Ultra is a multiplayer-focused space shooter in which players attempt to protect their home bases from black holes by attaching gravity orbs to them. In Yo Ho Kablammo!, players sail around a number of islands collecting treasure, priming mines, and attempting to sink other players' ships with cannon fire.

Microsoft also took the opportunity to show off Schizoid, the first XNA Game Studio game set to be released on Xbox Live Arcade. Billed as "the ultimate co-op game," Schizoid is for two players, one in control of a red ship, and the other in control of a blue ship. Each ship can destroy enemies of its own color and is vulnerable to enemies of the opposing color, so players must work together to clear waves of enemies while keeping each other safe. Developed by Bellevue, Washington-based Torpex Games, Schizoid is set for release later this year.

Finally, the company detailed new game content usage rules designed to give people more creative freedom in how they use footage from Microsoft games. Essentially designed to allow people to legally create machinima films based on Microsoft games (like the Halo-derivative Red vs. Blue), the new rules still retain a number of caveats, most notably that the content can only be used for noncommercial purposes, and that soundtracks and audio effects are off limits. The full text of the new rules is available on Microsoft's Web site.

63 Comments

  • IRoxxorUrSoxxor

    Posted Dec 2, 2007 1:01 am PT

    These actually look way more interesting than the other stuff on XBL. Then again, I'm one of the guys who bought Space Giraffe.

    EDIT: Good lord the Gravitron Ultra trailer sucked.

  • ghog69

    Posted Aug 18, 2007 3:19 pm PT

    They all seemed like neat little additions to Live Arcade, but IMHO the two runners up should have been the winners.

  • DeanCorleone

    Posted Aug 16, 2007 7:04 pm PT

    Its a mainstream game dev kit (XNA). It was built on DirectX most say, yes, but if you ask any vet to programing they will say one simple thing. NXA is targeted for the hobbist programmer - Oh by the way smarty DirectX SDK's are free as well. Below are simple quotes from GameDev.net ( a site abuot game dev since you want to act like you know so much ebookerd1)
    "XNA is targeted at hobbyist. DirectX is still alive and kicking, and there are no plans to replace it with XNA."
    "Well, it depends on what you really want. Do you want to make high performance applications using the latest in graphical technology? Do you want to use C++? Do you just want to get stuff on the screen and make a game? Do you ever intend to target different platforms (other than PC and XBox 360)?"

    "I don't think DirectX will be replaced by XNA as the more popular choice (at least not any time too soon). XNA is still pretty young. I've done a little bit with both (DirectX 9 and XNA), and what it really comes down to is what you want to do with it.
    "
    Its the same thing as using the Windows API's to make a game, addition over-head makes it easy to use, but you're not going to see anything really impressive from it for awhile to come its to young, and M$ wants to try to push it to add another income source to its Xbox Live Arcade setup.

    XNA doesn't have support for any other operating systems, as of yet, and like you said if you want to put stuff on 360 - you have to pay... Wow M$ after more money. XNA is in my opinion a RAD tool, look it up. Its like learning VB 6.0 when you're able to learn, and download C++ Express for free...

    P.S. DirectX 9 is a dev-kit as well(Look up SDK if you are confused by simple terms), it supplies a serious set of API's just as OpenGL does(look that one up also if ya need to.), idiot. (referring to ebookerd1 ).

    I don't bash things I only say my opinion - XNA is very young, and is targeted toward simple, basic programmers. I'm sorry if I enjoy the idea of learning more complex programming, and look down on something other then that - its my opinion, so don't call me a idiot because you're being a fanboy of something new (XNA)
    Have a nice day.

  • jknight5422

    Posted Aug 16, 2007 4:48 pm PT

    I like the XNA approach. I'm hoping somebody will use it to make more PC rpg-oriented games, instead of just arcade. It seems it should be useful for creating some time-consuming games of that nature.

  • orfbin

    Posted Aug 16, 2007 4:47 pm PT

    Blazing birds looks amazing!! I love badminton

  • playstation_wii

    Posted Aug 15, 2007 6:34 pm PT

    It's nice to have new faces in the gaming industry.

  • VenDaler

    Posted Aug 15, 2007 6:08 pm PT

    I tried to get into the XNA thing, but what I made, wasn't running on my computer, so i haven't tried it since. I don't know if it was my computer or what, but after all I put into it, i haven't tried again... yet.

  • ebookerd1

    Posted Aug 15, 2007 8:25 am PT

    Hey DeanCorleon, XNA is free unless you want to put the games on Xbox. then it is a $99 license per year. I think it is worth it considering they give you a free tool kit that you should be paying 400 dollars for as far as software and enuff tutorials to build close to anything. By the way and it is built on DX9. You can use it for PC games as well it is great. Try reading up on something before bashing it like an idiot. The DX core is needed for sound and additional features. It is just a lighter interface that is much simplers than attempting to code it by hand. Thus making it a Dev tool kit. give it a try it is pretty fun. you can be a Dev Noob and probably come up with something.

  • ebookerd1

    Posted Aug 15, 2007 8:13 am PT

    Nice XNA is great if you can get it to work on your system I have been trying to get that thing to work for 3 months now. But the demos and environment from a coders standpoint is really good. It is nice to see up and comming developers getting a chance to make it out there. It gives me more hopes that I won't have to move to india to get my next job. LOL!!

  • Nawras

    Posted Aug 15, 2007 3:46 am PT

    Most awesome!

  • subrosian

    Posted Aug 14, 2007 1:39 pm PT

    Schizoid seems like a complete ripoff of the excellent Ikaruga.

  • DeanCorleone

    Posted Aug 14, 2007 10:25 am PT

    Wow M$ is really forced their new XNA Game dev kit - I see it maybe as a replacement for DirectX series in the long run. I don't look at it as "M$ helping small game makers"... they are simply mustering up attending for their XNA software. No I'm not a PS3 Fanboy. I own a 360... I just figured since M$ is pretty much dropping the DirectX that they are moving on to XNA APIs and trying to try to push the market as they did in the 90's with DirectX.

    Either way its nice to see such detailed games being created in a small amount of time. They are good at what they do.

  • Dreski83

    Posted Aug 14, 2007 9:27 am PT

    sounds like Microsoft isn't all that bad after all... best wishes to the winners tho, I look forward to checking out their games.

  • Hvac0120

    Posted Aug 14, 2007 8:49 am PT

    The two winners sound pretty cool. I especially like over-the-top violence in my samurai games!

    Glad to see that all four games come from different parts of the world. Nice to see the diversity in there.

  • football_legend

    Posted Aug 14, 2007 2:13 am PT

    Awesome, goodluck guys

  • oddworld7

    Posted Aug 14, 2007 12:58 am PT

    dishwasher and YoHo looks good

  • shabulia

    Posted Aug 14, 2007 12:42 am PT

    Holy crap, Dishwasher: Dead Samurai looks incredible!!! It's like Alien Hominid HD but black and white with tons of red blood and more violence!

  • cowbrains788

    Posted Aug 14, 2007 12:14 am PT

    XNA is C# oriented, you can currently port them to your 360 via LAN connection, but they said somewhere (don't quote me) that they would be uploadable through a screening process by 2009 or 2010

  • edhc44

    Posted Aug 13, 2007 10:53 pm PT

    turk4eva41

    i dont know how to use xna. can some one help
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    It's not like you can make games just by "clicking around", it's a C# based IDE with some tools to aid development for PC or X360. I'm still learning C#, but I know other programming languages (and even developed a couple of games in Java), but if you're not a coder and don't intend to become one, don't even bother.

  • Pete5506

    Posted Aug 13, 2007 6:14 pm PT

    some cool games I hope

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