Hit over the head with the Creator's Club

So it’s another early day (4 am) at work where my shit is done and I am waiting to hear that no one broke anything I care about. So far so good.

But that isn’t today’s post. Nope, I have real honest to goodness thoughts to share. Today we will be talking about the XNA Creators Club. I mentioned that I thought this was the best thing since slice bread earlier, but I wasn’t sure about it. My curiosity won out, and I shelled out the $100. In fact I did it almost a week ago, and have been too chicken to do anything with it. Seriously, it was a late night when I did it, I bought, saw you needed to hook up stuff from the PC (kind of a downer) and set it aside. Well, last night I did something with it.

So they want you to plug everything in via cable (not wireless), which I did. I followed the instruction to set up my wife’s laptop. Now you need some stuff installed on the laptop to make it work, this doesn’t bother me, but the installs took like two hours. I needed the .NET framework 2.0 (I had 1.1), DirectX 9.0 (which you most likely have if you play games on your PC), the XNA Framework 1.0 (if you want to play something you build on the PC), the Visual Studio C# Express Edition with MSDN help files (took most of the time to install/download), the XNA Game Studio Express, and optional, although I hear it cool the Torque Express Game Builder eta. I haven’t tinkered with it, but since I hear I want it, I installed it.

Then from inside C# express you can finish setting up the link to the PC. So now friggin’ what? Well for someone like me, the answer was simple, poke around until something looks interesting. I should have gone straight to the help file, but more on that later. I opened a new project and have some templates to choose from, some of which are the nearly complete games. One had an option for the PC, and for the XBOX. Well, I thought I would start simple and just try the PC version. That has to be easier right? So I tried to find “compile” in the menus, which I didn’t there was a debug thingy, and since I like hitting buttons I tried. That was what I wanted, so I got lucky. Sadly, my wife’s laptop doesn’t have the horse power to run this sucker. The graphics card is too crappy. I was distraught and cried for two hours. OK, not really, I actually just figured I would install this shit on my desktop and try to make it work wirelessly later, but I close the first project and opened the XBOX version of the same game. Since I had set up the connection already, it compiled and went over to the XBOX 360 and worked. There was a bit of fiddling, but wasn’t hard, and it opens up with the instructions right in front you. If you read it, the built in samples will work.

So I had just put a game onto the 360 myself, and even though I did no more than what you can get a well trained monkey to do, it felt good, and I felt like I had a shot at this. So inspired by the built in directions from the project, I looked at the help. This is what a moron like me needs. At the same time, my wife wanted to watch some stuff on the DVR. It turns out she recorded the “Clay Aiken Christmas”. As a side note, this is the worst show ever in the history of mankind. And I have watched the homemade stuff on Cable Access. So while that sin against humanity played in the background I read the help file. It has some very good, and basic tutorials. I haven’t tried them yet, but expect to see me post more on this as I go.

So going forward, I am definitely going to complete the tutorials, then start out on a basic game. I have some basic themes floating around, and I think I will try a side-scroller. The tutorials look like they will give me a decent shot at succeeding at that. I may also try to write an article for the site about this whole process. Let me know what you think as I go.