XNA Arcade Alpha 1
Frustrated over the difficulty of distributing XNA games? Don’t like having to package installers all the time? I sure am.
I figured it’s about time we had a front-end for normal people to get and play our XNA games. As a community we’ve made some amazing stuff, but it’s still difficult to get casual gamers playing our games. Enter XNA Arcade.
This program will grab a games listing from one or more xml trackers on the web, which it will use to populate a categorized listing of games. The user can then navigate to a category, choose a game, then download it, all through the app. Once the game is downloaded, it will install itself, and the user can just click the Play button in the application to play the game.
Easy!
And better - as a developer, all you have to do is zip up your compiled “bin” directory and upload it somewhere, then get your game’s information in a tracker. Since XNA Arcade will install the DirectX, XNA and .NET 2.0 redistributables with itself (it doesn’t do this yet), you don’t have to worry about the end-user having them!
Like the title says, this is still an early alpha (i.e. functional prototype). It’s not necessarily secure, robust or cleaned up yet, but if you’d like to try it out, you can download it here:
http://www.kyleschouviller.com/files/gametest/XNAArcade.zip
I figure with some more development and community support, we could get a couple sites hosting games/trackers which developers can submit their games to. We could even add some ratings system or some other features.
Let me know what you think!
Added: I should note that Chris Hildenbrand, the artist of Shuggy and SSH, did the interface graphics. A great thanks to him.
August 8th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
how to publish the game information into the tracker?
I think you could add the function that the game developer can upload the game information at his end.
August 8th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
venile: Like I said, this is an alpha. My server can\’t handle everyone uploading their games to it, but I\’m hoping that by getting this out there we might be able to make a community effort to get something like that going.
A simple webform with a small panel for approving games would be all it would take (approval is needed to make sure viruses aren\’t being passed through and such). The tracker is just an XML file, and could be done like an rss feed from a website. I just can\’t host that all.
August 8th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Wonderful m8, if the project needs somone to help with approving titles pop me down.
August 9th, 2007 at 2:41 am
It’s a great thought, would you mind I introduce this product to chinese community….
August 9th, 2007 at 3:34 am
Go ahead - you should be able to run your own tracker by just editing the trackers.txt file. No guarantees on running more than one tracker though - didn’t get that tested.
August 11th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
I’ll see if the Burning Angels team would like their game on here
August 12th, 2007 at 4:42 am
what if rather than devs uploading there installers to your server it holds a link to there publish url?
just a thought.
August 12th, 2007 at 4:48 am
ok I read this properly and that’s what it seems it do, sorry stupid me
August 12th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Hehe, well, I WOULD like for developers to be able to upload their games to a server in the future - but it’s just not a possibility for me to host that sort of thing - I just can’t afford the space that would be required. However, if there’s someone out there who can, I’m sure we could all band together and start a great game sharing site, with this as a downloadable frontend.
October 11th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Looks like an excellent utility! I was actually thinking about developing an xna games website with instructions and everything needed to get users downloading and playing xna games (so far, got a logo, thats it), this may just be one step better. Definately interested in keeping tabs on this and releasing my games too it if possible. Are you going to allow full games only or demos too or?
October 18th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Aha, sorry, I’m kind of slow on updating (or checking) my site recently. So answer your question though: this is pretty much an open platform for whatever XNA-related stuff you want to release. As long as it has an exe and doesn’t have any requirements other than XNA requires, it should run it just fine. You could set up your own feed and try it out if you wanted, even.
March 1st, 2008 at 6:18 am
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