Pretty exciting day today for the team – as I speak, Michael Klucher is presenting the first public talk on how to develop games for Windows Phone 7 Series devices. There’s been some good buzz around the show about the phone, and it looks like it’s translated nicely to filling the room!
So far Michael’s walked through the basic XNA Framework, and is currently demoing how easy it is to build a game for the PC and re-use much of that code to launch the game on the phone. It’s cool stuff – I can tell how excited he is to finally be able to share what he’s been working on for literally years… I’ve been there myself with Xbox LIVE and Xbox 360, and I can tell he’s having a blast!
Beyond today’s talks, I’d also like to point you to some of the coverage yesterday from our press demos. We showed off a couple of titles, including hardware accelerated 3D support and achievements which Engadget hit on in their post. The thing that’s most exciting to me is that we’re finally able to show off full-screen 3D titles, rendering in real-time with full hardware acceleration. All through the 3D functionality we supply in XNA Game Studio 4.0. Here are some sample shots:
Some folks are asking how they can start developing a Windows Phone game. There are some amazing ideas floating around out there about how to build experiences across devices with Xbox LIVE at the center. I’m really excited by some of them, and am looking forward to seeing the innovation you all bring to the platform. Some of these folks are already looking ahead and asking who they can talk to about their game – and we have an answer for you. 
The bar is pretty high for titles to be able to use Xbox LIVE services – we’re aiming for a very high-quality, managed portfolio. But if you feel you’ve got the ideas and the chops to hit that bar, both our publishing partners and ourselves are interested in talking with you! You can start developing today with XNA Game Studio 3.1; XNA Game Studio 4.0 with Windows Phone support will be available later this month. (And fear not – everyone else will of course be able to release your titles to the Windows Phone Marketplace – we’ll be talking a lot more about that next week at MIX.)
Feel like you’ve got game? Here’s what you do:
- Email wpgames@microsoft.com with a description of your game and your contact information. We’ll send you a content submission form. We love playable demos!
- If your game is accepted, you’ll hear from the developer relations staff and we’ll work with you to get you the resources required to get started.
- We’ll take care of the rest – game integration, promotions, marketing, data analysis and community support.
Please note, by submitting your game, you agree to the following: Unless and until we sign a contract for the publishing and distribution of this game, we don’t have any kind of formal relationship other than under existing contracts between us. This is to protect both of us: for example, it means that if you spend money working on the project, then you don’t expect us to reimburse you, and it means you may develop and publish this game (excluding any Microsoft intellectual property) for other platforms without consequences. Nothing anyone who works for either of us says or does will change this unless and until your game is selected and we enter into a formal written agreement for our Xbox LIVE portfolio.
Look forward to seeing how you push the boundaries of what’s possible with Xbox LIVE!
Made it to GDC, and I have to say it’s been great hearing buzz around Windows Phone already! We’ve got some great big banners up (as you can see), and between dinner last night and just getting coffee this morning I’ve had five folks ask about where they can get more information about making games for Windows Phone at the show. Figured I’d put a little something up here I could point people to.
For one, definitely check out a great post Michael just put up, where he talks a bit about XNA Game Studio 4.0. I’ll also steal a quote from him to point you to Shawn Hargreave’s blog, where you can find a great deal more information on developing with XNA.
I’m excited to finally be able to talk to you all about XNA Game Studio 4.0 and Windows Phone 7 Series. If you’re new to XNA Game Studio learn more at http://creators.xna.com and get some details from http://ShawnHargreaves.com who has a great collection of information to get you started.
Finally, I’ll point you to an earlier post I did about our Windows Phone sessions at GDC. The short form is that we have the following four sessions, information about which can be found here:
- Developing Games for Windows Phone 7 Series*
- High Performance 3D Games on Windows Phone 7 Series*
- Development and Debugging Tools for Windows Phone 7 Series*
- Bringing the Best of Xbox LIVE to Windows Phone 7 Series*
* These sessions are repeated during the main conference Thursday March 11th through Saturday March 13th.
Off to a busy day of meetings and sessions! About to see Gareth Davis of Facebook at his “How Friends Change Everything” session – will be interesting to see how Facebook is thinking about Social Gaming.
Just saw David Pogue tweet about an Rube Goldberg music video by OK Go and wanted to share. Love this sort of thing! Thanks David!
Went down to San Francisco yesterday to attend a dinner where Charlie Kindle walked a few industry folks around how we approached building Windows Phone, as well as some of the ramifications for software development that fall out of that. Although I’ll point you to Charlie’s blog for some more thoughts, the big thing I want to highlight is that we’ve stepped into a brave new world. Windows Phone was built from the ground up with a focus on the end-user experience, and this focus gave us the opportunity to revisit every aspect of the Windows Phone platform, from hardware, software, and services to the applications platform partners would be able to use to develop apps. That said, stepping into this brave new world also requires change – and it’s significant. To quote Charlie:
For us, the cost of going from good to great is a clean break from the past. To enable the fantastic user experiences you’ve seen in the Windows Phone 7 Series demos so far we’ve had to break from the past. To meet the goals above we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. As a result previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series.
The expertise and familiarity with our tools is not lost. If you are a .NET developer today your skills and much of your code will move forward. If you are Silverlight or XNA developer today you’re gonna be really happy.
As we move into a connected, cloud-based world, partners have asked us for ways to more easily reuse their code and leverage that work across all of the connected platforms they’re now being asked to support. From the games perspective, partners are thinking about how to build and create games for consoles, the PC, web browsers, and mobile devices such as Zune and now Windows Phone. They’re looking to deploy their apps across all of these platforms, with as little additional work as possible to do so (such as UI or interface changes between platforms). To enable this we decided to break away from the past and focus on a few, core, well-established development platforms that deliver on that ask. Over the last few years we took steps in this direction by enabling the XNA Framework on the Xbox 360, PC, and Zune. Today we announced that we’re also extending the XNA Framework to Windows Phone, as well as enabling Silverlight application development.
We will be talking more about how to use the XNA Framework for games at GDC next week, and we will go into much more depth on both the XNA Framework and Silverlight the following week at MIX in Las Vegas. If you have any interest in developing applications for Windows Phone 7 Series devices, I strongly encourage you to attend MIX. In addition, keep an eye on the following blogs for additional details in the coming weeks:
- Michael Klucher – XNA Game Development and Design
- Shawn Hargreaves – XNA Coding and Optimization
- Anad Iyer – Silverlight Application Development
- Christian Schormann – Silverlight and Tools
I’ll be at GDC all next week, and then heading to Vegas for MIX the week afterward. Please let me know if you’re attending – love to meet up with some of you and get your thoughts!
It’s been a few days since we announced that we’ll be bringing Xbox LIVE to Windows Phone 7 Series. To recap, we stated that starting this holiday you’ll be able to:
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Collect Achievements and build your Gamerscore
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View Xbox LIVE leaderboards
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See your Xbox LIVE Avatar
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Access Spotlight feeds, including the latest tips and tricks, game news, updates and more
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Add Xbox LIVE friends to your friends list while out on the go
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Play turn-based (asynchronous) multiplayer games
We’re curious what you think! Anything strike you as particularly exciting? What sorts of Xbox LIVE-enabled experiences would you like to see us enable in the future? What questions do you have?
Although I won’t be able to answer all of your questions at this point in time, we should hopefully be able to address some of them. And I can tell you the product teams who are building the product will be reviewing your feedback as well, so it’s a great opportunity to speak up! Finally, though I am happy to also discuss on Twitter (via my Ozymandias account), please be sure to leave your comment here on the blog so the product team can access your feedback!
All that said, this is a public forum, and you should assume that anything you post might be read or used by pretty much anyone on the net, including Microsoft. Short form, if you think you have a killer idea that you want to go make a business from, you should not post it here. Otherwise, we look forward to the conversation!
We’ve announced Windows Phone 7 Series with Xbox LIVE, and also pointed folks to MIX10 to learn about developing applications for the platform. But what about games, those most exalted of applications? To cut to the chase, if you’ve got game, you’ll want to head to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and attend these sessions:
- Developing Games for Windows Phone 7 Series*
- High Performance 3D Games on Windows Phone 7 Series*
- Development and Debugging Tools for Windows Phone 7 Series*
- Bringing the Best of Xbox LIVE to Windows Phone 7 Series*
* These sessions are repeated during the main conference Thursday March 11th through Saturday March 13th.
You can also find some more information on both GDC and MIX from Michael Klucher and Shawn Hargreaves – well worth following in the months ahead! I’ll be at the show as well – love to chat if you’re going!
I’ve been a Quantic Dream fan ever since playing Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy (at least the early part of the game, before the plot went simply insane). Anyway, I pre-ordered Heavy Rain many months ago, hoping that the game would deliver on its early promise.
Having only spent a few hours with the game so far, it’s too early for me to have a reasonable opinion on that. However, something struck me early on, and I just haven’t been able to shake it: Heavy Rain and Natal were made for each other, and it’s a shame the two will never meet.
Playing Heavy Rain is a fascinating experience. The game tries to map contextual user input onto a controller – something that, in itself, has absolutely no context in the game world. It attempts to immerse you into that world by showing you a motion which you need to duplicate on the controller – examples include having you swirl a stick to show a badge, or holding down an awkward series of buttons to simulate a difficult movement. The problem is that the controller itself simply doesn’t exist inside the game world – so the user is being asked to try and translate a motion that’s intended to suggest a real-world analog, then trigger it appropriately on a device that isn’t in that “real” game world. Unfortunately, this just isn’t that intuitive, even to a oldschool gamer like myself. And when I tried to have a non-gaming friend of mine play, he gave up in frustration saying that the controls were “just annoying.” He didn’t buy the immersiveness argument at all.
That led me to imagining what Heavy Rain might have been if time and space (and competitive interests) had allowed Natal to be the control interface. Suddenly you’d have an immersive story with digital actors that you could control by actually doing the appropriate movement. Pretend to flash that badge by swiping it from your side and holding it up. Slap the guy by literally slapping the air. It would all have to be tuned and playtested of course, but you’d have the huge advantage of every user already knowing how to play intuitively. As Natal promises, your body is the controller, and you already know how to play because the actions are the same ones you would naturally do.
It’s too bad that Natal and Heavy Rain end up being a “missed” opportunity (albeit exceedingly unlikely). I’ll be curious to see if Quantic Dream is able to anything with Sony’s motion controller… especially since no matter how good the implementation, you won’t be able to escape the fact that you’re still holding an actual controller. Guess I’ll just have to cross my fingers that the game will do really well, and we’ll have a chance to have Quantic Dream do something on the Xbox sometime in the future.
Via Engadget, sourced from Bunny, just wanted to past along a really fascinating article around SD card production in Asia. If you’ve ever had a chance to wander the pirate markets in China and wonder just how this stuff actually gets made, you’ll find it an interesting read.
Wanted to pass along a realistic take from Brian X Chen of Wired on both the challenges and opportunity Microsoft has with wooing developers to support the Windows Phone 7 Series. On the pessimistic side, we have some folks who wrote off Windows Mobile years ago:
Kai Yu, CEO of BeeJive, was pessimistic. He said his independent company, which makes apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry, wrote off Windows Mobile years ago because of “incomplete, half-assed” developer tools and a lack of support from Microsoft, and he doesn’t see those problems changing with a new operating system.
And while I wasn’t developer on Windows Mobile back in the day, I can say the overall quality of earlier phones using Microsoft’s phone OS was definitely lacking IMO. I’ve never been shy about the fact that I bought an iPhone the day it came out. With it, Apple took a huge step forward around creating a user-focused experience that paved the way for a “new” type of consumer: real people, living real lives.
On the positive side, I loved this quote from Jim Scheinman, COO of Pageonce:
“My speculation is that Microsoft has some incredible platforms they can tie all together with the new mobile platform,” Scheinman said. “If one developer can write across all the other platforms, that would be easier for us and all the developers…. If you want to attract hundreds of thousands of developers, it would behoove Microsoft to try to make that happen. That would be a very, very exciting opportunity for all of us.”
We’re not talking about details around our development platform until MIX10 in March. But I’ll highlight a recent quote from our Mobile Group chief Andy Lees from a recent conference call:
“You’re also right to point out that a marketplace is included, and the marketplace will work for applications but also for games, so the gaming marketplace for the first time will utilize Xbox Live, and that enables you to create multiplayer, multiscreen games, and the marketplace will facilitate that, so that it will actually work across screens.”
The opportunity is ours to lose in enabling developers to quickly and easily create applications and experiences (and games!) across multiple screens and devices. As Wired points out, we have a lot of work ahead of us… but I can also say that I think we’ve lined up all the dots such that when we actually draw the line, people will be very excited. If you have any interest at all in developing for Windows Phone 7, definitely hit MIX10. I’ll be there, and I’d love to chat with you! And yes, I am planning to replace my iPhone with a Windows Phone 7. Sorry Steve; it’s been a great ride, but I can’t resist being connected to my LIVE community and games… and I can hardly wait to see what the next year brings!
Hi All -
Thanks to a generous soul, I’m now able to use Ozymandias as my primary Twitter account! This will be my sole Twitter account going forward; please feel free to follow me here.
Happy Monday!
