Some exciting developments were uncovered at Microsoft’s keynote today, including details on XNA and community games.
Chris Satchell took the stage to talk about Microsoft’s XNA and community games, and he kicked things off with multiplayer co-op gameplay footage from The Dishwasher, winner of the DreamBuildPlay contest. It looked hot, and I’m ready to get my crazed dishwasher killing on.
Several community games were shown off, including the awesome-looking Jelly Car (Tonka trucks and jelly environments), Little Gamers (chainsaws + zombies, or beer + shotguns), Proximity HD, Rocketball, and many more. I don’t have footage for you, but I can offer something even better: demos of many these titles should be on Xbox Live now. Go look!
While we know that these XNA titles can be developed for Windows or the Xbox 360, but Chris Satchell showed off a real-time demo of gameplay on a Microsoft Zune. It was basically just a tech demo that Microsoft whipped up, but the touchpad seemed to provide decent control. XNA allows full development for this music player, and its wireless capabilities even permit multiplayer action.
Allowing games created with XNA to be able to be distributed over Live will surely bring lots of new and interesting titles. I can’t wait to see what happens when they let gamers make their own games.
