Huge Cleanup and Big XNA Announcement

While the details of the game play and rules are starting to take shape, I'm now in the middle of a huge process of breaking out a lot of the code to external classes...and praying I don't break the whole thing in the process.

I've done a few tests centered around one of the simpler classes and I think I'm ready to start tearing the bigger pieces out. *cross your fingers...mine are*

Along with the code side of things, I've been playing around with various icons for the different pickups in the game. Hopefully I'll have something to post soon on that.

On other news I was pretty pumped to hear the details about the upcoming changes to the XNA Community Games. Among them are a global name change, free tokens for marketing purposes, update pushes for existing games, and a price structure change.

XNA Community Games will soon be known as "XBox Live Indie Games". I think the name change is purely for restart purposes and honestly with all the 'non-games' that currently sit in the top 10 list I'm very surprised it wasn't renamed "XBox Live Apps".

Very soon when a new game is launched on the marketplace the game creator will be given 50 "tokens" to distribute to publications and...whoever they wish...to help promote the game and spread the word. I think this is a great call...at the very least it means I won't have to charge my friends and family in order to let them play the full game.

Something I had no idea, until it was spelled out in the new press release, is that current XNA games on the marketplace really have to way of letting people know an update has been made to the game. The best they could do was post something on a website and hope existing users saw it. Soon, they'll be able to notify current customers of an update to their game when the game launches....I'm guessing very much in the same way normal games do now.

And the final change, which caused the largest ripples in the water, was the pricing structure change. Instead of games being priced at either 800, 400, or 200 Microsoft points, the new prices will be either 400, 240, or 80 Microsoft points. One hard rule is that if your game is larger than a 50M download it can't be priced at 80MSP.

This announcement got quite a few people worked up on the Creator's Club site but I think it's a good thing. Some say it will open the doors to flood the marketplace with 'crap' games. Well, I'd hate to say it, but that door may have swung open quite a while ago. If I see another 'massager or image viewer' app referenced as a 'game' I'm gonna have to hurt someone. The Creator's Club, I believe, was created for aspiring and hobbiest game designers to let their visions loose on the world and bring their ideas to life. While the current tools may not allow 'everyone' to fullfill this dream (with a decent hill to climb) it is, at it's base, aimed at hobbiests. Make these games because they're fun and/or challenging to make, or to use it you create a game to help you break into the gaming industry, or...simply because you've always wanted to...not because you've got a multi-million dollar businessplan behind it.