Contest kicks off in XNA community
If you’re interested in getting into the game development business, now you have the perfect chance. Microsoft announced at GDC that they will be starting a contest in their XNA community. Submit the best game by July 2, 2007 and you’ll get some nice swag, 10,000 dollars, and the opportunity to have your game published on Xbox Live.
The Dream-Build-Play contest challenges entrants to create a game for the Xbox 360 or for Windows XP SP2 using XNA Game Studio Express. The games will be judged on three categories, 40% for innovation, 40% for fun factor, and 20% for production quality. Games have a size limit of 250mb or less, following on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement of a 512mb memory unit for the 360.
This is excellent news for aspiring developers and gamers alike. Never has it been easier for content creators to have their ideas reach an audience. Just as important, is the ability for these developers to turn their creations into commercially viable properties. This will only lead to more innovation, and higher product standards. All in all, this is yet another reason thats its a very good time to be a gamer.
Thanks to nofear360 for submitting.
There’s a stack of other noteworthy XNA stuff announced yesterday too:
- New website at http://creators.xna.com which contains a stack of very, very useful sample code, and a new community area
- Announcement that Creators Club members will get a free licence to use the TorqueX engine (as of May 2007)
- There’s going to be an XNA area at GDC, where teams will be competing to build a game within four days
As for the contest itself, I signed up for XNA a while back and I’ve been tuning my skills in anticipation of this… I like the judging criteria, I’m glad they’re only judging 20% on production quality
Anyone who has the talent and ability to create xna games, Or any game for that matter, My hat is off to ya.
Nice, I hope this’ll bring some more quality titles to XBLA! I’m sure there are lots of independent developers out there capable of out-doing most XBLA games (especially retro ones).
XNA? That done in C#?
In C sharp? I don’t think so.
Glovner - yes it is
Hopefully I can get an early build of my game together and submit by then. 10k isn’t bad but if someones game does get picked they could easily make 10x that if not more.
I don’t think they can. When you enter the contest I think you sign over all rights to the game to Microsoft, so they’re free to take all the profits… However the prize also includes a contract to make real XBLA games for yourself, so if you’ve got TWO great ideas for games then you might be in luck