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Since we recently helped design the Hexic and Sudoku games for Zune, we decided to take a deeper dive into XNA during some downtime after the holidays.  If I were to describe XNA in one word, the word would be “easy”.  In four words, “easy like Sunday morning”.  I’m not saying any one-eyed chimp will be able to crank out games, but it is very easy to get started, and it’s all free. 

To get started head over to http://creators.xna.com/, sign up, if you don’t have Visual C# 2008, you can grab the free Express edition, then download and install Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0, choose a tutorial, and you’re ready to go.  Every step of  the way is explained in detail. 

After working with Flash and ActionScript for so long, it’s kind of a relief to be working in a development environment that has so few bugs.  Intellisense works beautifully in Visual Studios, showing you every member, method, function, option, and grandma available, and in detail.  There is also real-time debugging if you leave the “Error List” open.  It is so anal-retentive it will even tell you if a function is not being used.  The scrollbars work properly, they don’t spaz out if you use the mouse wheel.  I think the neatest thing about it is that it’s easy to convert a project from PC, to Xbox360, and to Zune. 

It’s not perfect though, the help files are overly complex, the search function is useless, it was easier to just do a Google search most of the time.  If the studio were to move to XNA, we would have to drastically alter our process.  A lot of the UI stuff designers can do in Flash will have to be done completely in code, there’d be no tweaking by thee pixel pushers, me mateys, yaarrgh. 

Anyway, Microsoft really made it easy for people to get started developing in XNA, this is just a really quick and brief rundown of what it is, for more information, please go to:  http://creators.xna.com/. And here's more information on the Hexic and Sudoku games we did for Zune.