XNA Creators Club Future vision - Veebs.com

XNA Creators Club - A Future Vision

First of all, let me make it very clear that I am not employed by Microsoft and have no contact with the Xbox/Live/XNA group. These are just some ideas I wanted to put out there, see how people react. There are put here to allow people to talk about them more, or ignore them as ramblings of a mad man.

Introduction

This article will discuss my own view on how Microsoft and the Xbox Live team could gain more from the XNA creators club as well as how this could tie into things like the Forge (Halo 3 Map editor) and other games which features this type of sharable customisation.

The idea centres around 3 core ideas:

• CreatorScore - Like gamer score but points are given for contributing to and taking part in the Creative community on Xbox or on Windows Live
• New Creators Community - Based around publicising, sharing and discussing creative ideas.
• XNA Downloads on Live - Something already hinted to by Microsoft in the past

CreatorScore

This is a second points system which would co-exist with the traditional GamerScore on your GamerCard as a record of how much you contribute and enjoy community created content.

These points would be dished out by traditional retail games like Halo 3, Unreal Tournament, Forza 2 to people who contribute specific content to the community. In addition releasing a homebrew XNA game would also give a fixed number of points.

Game creators will also finally be able to hand out real CreatorScore achievement points for people enjoying their games. This will finally let people put their creative achievement thoughts to good use, I'm sure we will see some innovative achievment ideas.

To ensure quality of releases and retail mods the community is key, people will be rewarded for the number of people downloading and enjoying their contributions with additional CreatorScore points.

Retail Game Example

Here is an example of how the CreatorScore achievements would work in a retail game. All the points, including the limits, are examples and would need to be refined. Receiving 100 points for the number of downloads would probably work best on a sliding scale: 10 DL -> 10 points, 100 DL -> 15 points, 500 DL -> 25 points, 1000 DL -> 50 points.

Homebrew XNA Game

Here is an example of the CreatorScore points available to someone creating and releasing their own XNA game on Xbox Live or Windows Live.

Community

Like every part of the gaming experience it is all about community, and this is no different. This system is meant to reward and encourage the creation and enjoyment of community created content. Feedback and monitoring of the content will be key to maintaining quality and enjoyableness of the system.

I will ignore the requirements of retail games. Publishers already sign up to, and have to pass, Microsoft certification to be published on the Xbox platform, and to my knowledge Games for Windows too. This certification can be extended to include the CreatorScore. The interesting system here is how to police the user created games.

The obvious

The obvious part of the community will be the use of creators.xna.com as the developer resource for people looking to create their own games. Here they can create teams of people to work on a concept, or ask why their recursive pathf inding algorithm is so slow. This is basically what it already is.

Secondly there will be a public CreatorScore website where people can search and browse contributions from people, and request them for download onto their Xbox, like Halo 3 map downloads. This is in addition to having a CreatorStore Marketplace on Live where you can also browse by category, rating or author.

This second community is all about the fun, games and experience. Gamers will be able to talk on message boards about the games, and maybe even get involved in the development of Game 2.0!

Code of conduct

To enforce quality and decency in the community a Code of Conduct will be enforced on people releasing games and game content. Like the T&C on Live this code of conduct will be enforced with anything from removal of content and CreatorScore points to bannings from CreatorScore or Live. Obviously these measures are up to Microsoft.

• Must be playable - Sounds obvious, but the Game must work, be playable. This is not a quality requirement, just a functional one
• Non-offensive - Just like on Live
• Accurately Rated and described - When uploading games to Live the author must give it an age rating and accurately describe the content using the pegi icons
• Accurately categorised - The game must be, as accurately as possible, categorised in a particular genre (or two)
• Must obey the achievement limit - This could be managed within the XNA framework thus making it impossible to exceed the limit

Enforcement of these rules will primarily be done by a similar system to the Live feedback system currently in place for people. Active monitoring is also possibly by dedicated gamers at Microsoft downloading and playing content, but mainly they will be investigating violation reports.

XNA Downloads on Live

While the technical details of uploading and downloading content to the Live service are better left up to Microsoft it is clear that Xbox Live and Windows Live downloads will need to be introduced. Adding a special marketplace for all online user created games will allow people to gain more exposure, and means that normal gamers can enjoy the fruits of bedroom developers labours without needing to pay the developer subscription or compile code!

That's what it is all about!

Closing thoughts

I hope that these ideas will ignite some discussion in the forums and maybe get some people talking about putting something into action, not necessarily this! If you have any comments on this article e-mail webmaster%veebs.com, I will read everything I get, but please be wary that I have a pretty ruthless SPAM filter.