I'm currently off development to revise for exams but just before I moved to a break I signed up for DBP and pushed the 360 button on my XNA project.  Seemed to port over without too much issue, slight difference in the transparency handling (which is almost certainly a sign of different defaults and my forgetting to explicitly set something) but otherwise no code tweaks required.

The performance isn't all I'd hope for (few frames below the 60 cap) but then I'm only on one core right now and all my code was written for PC architecture optimisations and reviewing existing code for PCs.  I suspect some of my HLSL and general code might need to have a 360 path (will have to check out the code samples for some stuff and check).

Yep, there are often many answers and lots of different implementations that might work perfectly.  Sometimes you just have to ask yourself what kind of splines do you want to make today?

The internet is also a great way to look up previous implementations/equations to solve a problem and (recent experience) can turn forgetting some trig equations from a nightmare into merely a very embarrassing lapse of memory.

The small print rules say it'll open at midnight tonight (US time, Central) for registrations.  Seems like a very good way to play with the 360 and maybe do some Community Games stuff without having to pay the normal subscription fee to allow your stock 360 unit to act as a dev box for XNA projects.

Oh, and if you get a project finished in the next few month you might even win a prize (or get some decent downloads from a Community Games release for a bit of cash).

I begged/borrowed from friends and family on top of what savings I could put together to get enough cash to make 6 months of basic living possible (rent, bills, basic foodstuffs, few quid for a pint now and again to unwind and keep contact with friends). Working with free/open source tools keeps working costs down and living in cramped accommodation is another big plus (although if people start down this path early enough they might get some very good rates renting a room from parents - something I wish I'd considered 5-10 years ago).  Work out how much it takes to survive for your team (if you're all dedicated to the plan) or how much you need to live on and how much it'll cost to buy in talent in areas you lack and see how long you could last on low savings.

The scope of a project is naturally limited if you don't have money for a year or two of development time but once the first product is out of the door you can build on that experience to work faster and better on the next game and with a proven track record to leverage for a real loan.  Hopefully sales will provide an ongoing income to minimise your loan exposure.


For me that bet will only pay off if I can keep roughly to schedule (and as this is the first project I've been lead on I may have miscalculated the work required at my skill level to get some things done) with 1000 sales over the product lifetime at a reasonable price.  It's a risk, but if it works and sales come in then that can fund the more experimental ideas I have and this work should help boost my skills to the level where I could pull those ideas off competently.

Rather boring, but this is the XNA generic opening

Code:

static class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
using (Game1 game = new Game1())
{
game.Run();
}
}
}

Hi all,

I'm a new recruit to the indie developer ranks.  I was between jobs at the start of the year so didn't need to quit anything but beyond that it was the standard mantra, 'get an idea, quit day job, make a game'.  One guy, office crammed into my flat, enough cash for a few months of development time before Ramen will become luxury foodstuffs.

So far I'm finding C# easy going (my main experience before was in PHP, during particularly boring webapp development times it turned into OO-for-the-sake-of-it-PHP, which has made the transition easier) and playing with XNA I do have a cheatsheet for quite a few classes and functions that I don't have to worry about writing myself.

I keep a blog with musings and project updates, hopefully it'll be a bit more eventful once I finish the gameplay code and quickly work through networking and some basic AI to get a closed Alpha running to tweak how the game plays.

Final plans are to get direct sales and whichever portals/online stores will accept it going first on the PC side and then quickly port it for a Community Games release on 360.  Working with XNA means the porting will be a UI redesign for the TV and control tweaks but not a lot more so is basically free (and worth it for the experience of pushing code to the 360 if not the tens of sales a CG release can achieve).


Oh, I did work on an indie project in the past so I'm not jumping completely blindly.  There I was doing technical art stuff so this is the first time I've branched out into game code and design.

-Shivoa