Develop It Yourself

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XNA developer and technical director of Torpex Games, Jamie Fristrom, explains: "While C# on the PC is almost as fast as native code on the PC, C# on the Xbox is definitely slower than native code on the Xbox, so we're not at the point where we're going to have a Halo-killer written in C# yet."

That 'yet' is pretty significant—Fristrom is quick to evangelise C# and XNA. He has reason to be optimistic about XNA's potential given that Torpex Games is one of the first companies to make the leap from the XNA community to commercial distribution on Xbox Live Arcade with its co-operative title, Schizoid.

"The learning curve is so shallow you can make your game really quickly," says Fristrom. "Because C# is simply a much better language than C or C++ it continues to make you more productive all the way up to ship. There's no reason why you can't ship a commercial game with XNA—we're going to. Although XNA really only officially supports C# right now, some clever guys have done more with it. Generally, the people who are saying: 'You can't make a real game in C#' are the same sorts of people who, 15 years ago, said: 'You can't make a real game in C'."

While Schizoid's commercial release is currently an anomaly among XNA titles, it is a path that is likely to become increasingly welltrodden, with Microsoft intending to remove many of the restrictions. Hindrances like the lack of support for network code are liable to change with the release of the successor to Game Studio Express in the coming months.

"For the first release of XNA Game Studio we wanted to focus on getting great tools into the hands of the community and taking the unprecedented step of giving them development access to their retail console," explains Satchell, Microsoft's own XNA evangelist-extraordinaire. "The second release will focus on enabling games to be built that could be shipped as either Xbox Live Arcade or retail titles. This is another big step, but still requires a publishing contract.

"For those developers who have a publishing agreement in place, we will be making additional libraries available which support the full Xbox Live feature set including matchmaking, Achievements and leaderboards into their games. These approved games will also have the ability to get certified and distributed electronically via Xbox Live Marketplace. Having this level of consistency in our offerings and the ability to take a game 'all the way' will really open up avenues for the community to showcase their creativity even wider."

Between this and the recent Dream Build Play contest, in which budding developers competed to win an Xbox Live Arcade publishing contract, it's clear that Microsoft is keen to see individuals use its tools to create games of professional quality, and directly funnel these amateur ambitions into commercial products.

"We were so impressed with what the community created that we ended up awarding two first place prizes, both of which may become XBLA games," says Satchell, pointing out that the winners produced every aspect of the games themselves while holding down day jobs (one as a grocery store clerk, the other a Java programmer). "Given the number of entries that showcased innovative gameplay and overall quality," Satchell adds, "I wouldn't be surprised to see more of these games picked up by publishers at some point."

Satchell's ambition for XNA is an egalitarian one, certainly. "In the future," he says, "our vision is to open this up and allow members of the XNA Creators Club to share their games with the millions of people on Xbox Live." But, like Holman, Satchell is acutely aware that what benefits the indie community brings prosperity to the industry as a whole: "If you can make gaming more socially relevant by having timely, topical content, recommended and ranked by the community, you can draw more people in."

The measured strategy with which Microsoft has approached this task suggests that it doesn't view encouraging the indie scene as simply a matter of democratising development. The increasing power of the homebrew community is an inevitability that all three console manufacturers will have to recognise; though their efforts to engage with it may be an investment of considerable significance, the results will have profound effect upon their bottom line and the vitality of the industry as a whole.

Provided by Next Generation—Interactive Entertainment Today