Luke Drumm has just presented a session on game development using XNA Game Studio Express.  It was a very enjoyable session with the presentation shown being built using XNA (Luke actually progresses "slides" using a xbox controller).

XNA looks like a fair bit of fun for doing homebrew game dev, so here's a few things I've picked up.

XNA Game Studio Express needs Visual Studio C# Express Edition.  It's a hassle to set it up with VS2005 Pro so it's easier to save yourself the pain and just do a side by side installation of express and pro.

Luke showed how simple XNA dev work is, and how XNA hides a lot of the complex DX9 messy stuff.  In fact a simple 3d demo he showed gave no concerns to texturing, lighting, shaders, effects, or anything else.

The speed of XNA is really good and definitely fast enough for most users.  If you want to get fancy you can always get down to the DirectX level, but you really shouldn't have to under normal circumstances.   In fact the best thing about XNA seems to be what doesn't need doing compared to all the effort that was required before under DirectX.

XNA includes default Effects & Shaders so that you don't need to build them for an OOTB experience which is good as the dev experience for non-default shaders is not the best (it's notepad based for now).  Better dev experiences for shaders are available from ATI  (rendermonkey) and NVidia but the learning curve is steeep.  OSS variants exist (check codeplex).

Free 3d modeling tools can create models in DirectX format.  Blender is probably the most powerful, but it's also the most complex and non-intuitive to use.  Audacity is good for sound editing.

If you're a lazy game dev - grab a starter kit or sample (spacewar, xna racer, etc) and start hacking.

If you're a really lazy game dev then garage games has torquex for building 2d games.  www.blade3d.com does something similar for 3d games.

If you're an unbelievably lazy game dev, then you're best bet is to go to a shop :-)

Oh, Luke also talked a bit about Gears of War and the computing power required.  The game logic required about 0.5 gigaflops.  The physics and game updates took about 5 gigaFlops and the graphics required a massive 50 gigaFlops of power.  Thankfully the GPU and hardware shaders these days are fast enough to keep up with this sort of demand.

 

For more info on XNA check out

www.virtualrealm.com.au/blogs/mykre

http://creators.xna.com/

and keep an eye on GameFest for XNA news over the next week or so.