This blog is about Silverlight game development, but if you’re writing managed code for your Silverlight game, why not explore some of the other options available to you as well to get maximum exposure for your game and hopefully make some money as well?
XNA Game Studio and Xbox Live Independent Games
XNA Game Studio allows you to create games for Windows, Xbox, and Zune. You write your games in C# and you can write 2D or 3D games (2D only on Zune right now). XNA doesn’t have a vector graphics library built in, so if you want to make your games more portable, stick to image based graphics.
Xbox Live Independent Games is a way for you to sell your game on Xbox. Anyone can do it, you just need to pay $99 a year for a premium subscription.
As a bit of a shameless plug, I currently have a game on Xbox called Dr. Popper, it’s a simple bubble breaker game but it’s fun even the kids enjoy it. You can download a free trial here (or buy it for a dollar):
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550147/
You make 70% of every sale and now games can be sold in more countries including USA, Canada, UK, Singapore, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Japan, and Sweden. There are restrictions on the countries that can submit games as well right now, so please view the details before shelling out the $99. With this subscription you also get to playtest and peer review other people’s games for the Independent Games channel.
There are some great game development resources available on http://creators.xna.com and even if you don’t end up creating a game in XNA, it can be helpful to get an understanding of how they structure their game class. It may give you some ideas for how to structure things in Silverlight, a lot of my game tutorials came from implementing what they do in a Silverlight way.
You can now write 2D games for both XNA and Silverlight using my free SilverSprite library at http://silversprite.codeplex.com. To use it, you would have to write your game in the XNA style and then recompile for Siverlight using the SilverSprite library.
Windows Mobile Marketplace
Windows Mobile has a new marketplace coming up for 6.x phones. Think iPhone app store for Windows Mobile and it’s probably pretty close. This is just getting started so instead of jumping into a saturated market like iPhone, why don’t you become an early adopter here?
http://developer.windowsmobile.com/Marketplace.aspx
Silver Arcade
For Silverlight games, you can get more exposure for your game and hopefully make some money at http://silverarcade.com as the volume of users on the site increases. I’m one of the founders of Silver Arcade, and my partners on the site are extremely talented and we’ll be providing helpful libraries for Silverlight game developers soon.
July 27th, 2009 at 11:32 AM
I wish there was a vector graphics library for XNA…
Question: is it possible to sell Silverlight Application on Windows Mobile Marketplace?
July 27th, 2009 at 1:42 PM
There have been no recent announcements about Silverlight on Windows Mobile, I would hope that if and when Windows Mobile gets Silverlight support that you would be able to write an app in Silverlight and sell it but we won’t know until an announcement is made.
July 29th, 2009 at 9:13 AM
Great article Bill. I’m actually trying to develop my current game as “loose coupled” as possible, so it should (in theory
) be easier for me to port to XNA and thereby Xbox. I don’t have any experience with XNA at all, but the vector graphic problem could be solved by doing all the graphics as PNG or similar at this point.
Another thing. I don’t have an Xbox, so I don’t know if XNA game is just able to run on all Xbox’s or what? I mean, I only want to consider porting my game to Xbox if there is a fair amount of users to play it there. I think I heard long time ago, that it were pretty complicated to install or something like that, so not many people were actually able to run XNA games, except for the developers them self. That isn’t fun and I hope I’m completely wrong here
Best regards,
Mads
July 30th, 2009 at 9:52 AM
Yes you can run on any Xbox (in the supported countries) if your game is on the Indie Games channel. It downloads just like any other Xbox Live game. The XNA framework is pre-installed on all Xbox systems.
I have made over $4000 on Dr. Popper to date on over 2000 sales. Over 10000 users have downloaded the free trial.
July 31st, 2009 at 7:25 AM
Oh my god! That's cool, and as far as I can see this "LIVE Markeplace"-thing, is only just getting started, it's only in what 5-6 countries? I live in Denmark, which is not on the list yet, but could I still put up games?
I looked a little on the XNA site you link to and see that when you install this Game Studio you can make games for PC, Xbox and Zune. I don't have an Xbox, but want to still be able try and port my game to XNA, can I then make it as a XNA PC game, and then later "convert" it easilly to and Xbox game/project? He said in the video that it were the same code, so guess this is possible. I mean if I can get it to work as a XNA PC game, it should work as an XNA Xbox game also, the only change would be the control inputs fra the user, or what?
I will stop asking silly question now and have a look at the XNA site when I get time. I'm only in the beginning phase of my game ( http://laumania.net/category/Little-Longhorn.aspx ) so it might be smart for me to already now have game logic in one asseble and then have a UI project for Silverlight and a UI project for XNA. I know it sound easier then it is, but what would your suggestion be here?
PS: I'm pretty amazed that you made that much money on such a "simple game"
August 3rd, 2009 at 9:48 PM
Hi Bill
I actually tryed out XNA and SilverSprite and as a part of that research I ended up having ported the "Platformer" starter kit to Silverlight using SilverSprite
http://laumania.net/post/Porting-XNA-starter-kit-...
I had to implement and change different stuff in SilverSprite to make it work, but I have submitted the changes as a patch on codeplex.
You have done an amazing job with SilverSprite and it's pretty smart just to haven an "1-to-1" version of XNA in Silverlight (SilverSprite that is).
You often talk about SilverSprite as a way to port XNA games to Silverlight, which it does pretty good, but maybe you should try also to let people know that it actually is "XNA for Silverlight". It's actually a "game development framework" for Silverlight, with the basic "syntax" of XNA. I haven't looked THAT much into it yet, but this is how I see i(SilverSprite) right now.
Best regards,
Mads Laumann