It might not be as grand or as beneficial to humanity as the DARPA Grand Challenge, but Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express Challenge may make dreams of basement-brewed games plausible. The event is meant to illustrate XNA’s ease of use. To get its point across, Microsoft set up a prominent display in the north hall of San Francisco's Moscone Center. Four teams of programmers are diligently coding four original titles. The catch? They have only four days to finish their projects, which will be presented to the public (and eventually available for download) Friday morning.
Despite the petting zoo-like setting, Microsoft hopes these programmers (suffering distractions from onlookers and the press) will complete titles that showcase the power of XNA and nudge attendees into entering the Dream-Build-Play competition (XNA developers compete for $10,000 and the opportunity to have their game published on Xbox Live Arcade). The message: If this crew of amateur and indie developers can do this in four days – imagine what you could do in a month or two. With one to two weeks of prep time, the teams set out at 9:30 am this morning to turn an idea into a game. All code, designs and art must be made from scratch.
I'll be checking in with the contestants over the next week to track their progress and slip them much needed Red Bull. Hit the jump to meet the crew.
Team #1
Benjamin Nitschke, 26, and Christoph Rienaecker, 24, Hanover, Germany-based independent developers.
If there were a poster child for XNA, it would be Benjamin Nitschke. Co-founder of .Net development studio exDream, he's the most experienced with the XNA platform. Last year Microsoft commissioned him to create an XNA racing game, which will be released in an upcoming Studio Express starter kit. Big deal. But he and his small team managed to put together a physics engine, hi-def graphics, lens flares and three tracks in six weeks. The arcade racer is visually impressive, and its ghost races and roller coaster-like tracks offer a fair challenge. Microsoft execs tout that the project would have taken months for a normal development team to complete. Now Nitschke says he is ready for the four-day challenge, and he hopes to do something "really crazy."
With artist Christoph Rienaecker in tow, Benjamin plans to build a complete 3D action RPG. They've already created some of the base textures and are working on constructing the cave players will explore. As Benny says, they plan to leave all the hard stuff until the end so they'll at least have a functional demo by Friday. If things go according to plan, they will have created a game in a span of days that, Benny says, would normally take years.
Team #2
Andre Furtado, 26, Recife, Brazil-based student.
Andre's specialty isn't game design. As a P.H.D candidate at the Federal University of Pernambuco, he spends most of his time researching and designing development frameworks (similar to Renderware). His game building experience comes from cobbling together demos to illustrate his software industrialization research.
What's interesting about Andre is that he didn't accept Microsoft's invitation in order to further his career. In fact, he didn't know what XNA was until a month ago when Microsoft hosted a Brazilian XNA Challenge (Andre added voice recognition to Space Wars, the XNA pack-in). Rather, he plans to take the knowledge he learns back to Brazil to help stimulate games development in his local community.
Voice recognition is of particular interest to him, and he hopes it will complement his XNA Challenge title AbduX. Players will control an invading fleet of UFOs charged with abducting as many people as possible. If too many humans make it to the safety of military bunkers, you lose. With voice commands, you'll be able to order your squad mates to attack certain quadrants of the map – blocking escape. And, if there's enough time, Andre will include aerial attacks from fighters and attack choppers.
Team #3
Josh Butterworth, 23, London-based hobbyist.
Josh has spent the past 18 months programming business applications. An avid gamer, he's joined up with the XNA Challenge to see if game development is in his future. Although he's been messing with XNA for about six months in preparation for the Dream-Build-Play competition, this will be his first complete game. He's relying on XNA to fill the holes left by his business background.
This week he plans to create a static shooter. One to four players will race through a Pac-Man-esque maze in an attempt to kill as many enemies as possible. Josh hopes to include five different weapon types to keep the game exciting.
The basic map is already laid out. If all goes well, he'll have scripted all the enemy paths by the end of today.
Team #4
Jonathon Stevens, 29, and Patrick Glanville, 41, Minneapolis-based independent developers.
By day Jonathon and Patrick work as business developers, by night and weekend they design games. They've been using XNA since it was in beta, and they've almost completed their first game Fowl Prowl (think Duck Hunt), which they plan to release next month.
An ambitious young studio, Last Straw Productions was originally planning to build a MMORPG, but as Jonathon explained, it realized it needed to be comfortable with the technology and get more press before embarking on such a huge undertaking. So now they're spending GDC coding a 2D side-scroller dubbed Simian Escape.
Their concept is based on the final days of the dinosaurs. With asteroids bearing down on Earth, the ape-like protagonist has to outmaneuver a host of nasty predators in order to reach safety. Due to time constraints, the duo plans for it to contain one, randomly generated level. The objective will be to escape with the most possible points.
Since the teams are competing against the clock instead of each other, they're here to learn as much from other participants and the experience as the public is to learn about XNA from them. I'll be chronicling their progress and impressions of XNA throughout the week. Check back for updates.
