You’ve been hearing about XNA for a full year now, starting at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2004. You may recall that XNA stands for Xbox Next-generation Architecture and is a robust game development "ecosystem" that utilizes great tools from both the Windows® and Xbox® sides to allow game developers to spend less time building code from scratch and more time being creative and innovative. Last year, you saw some great demos that showed off what was possible using the XNA toolset. Check them out at http://www.microsoft.com/xna/multimedia.aspx. My fave is Film Noir.
Now, it’s a year later, and this year’s GDC saw the announcement of XNA Studio, which will make life even better for beleaguered game developers. XNA Studio—based on Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005 Team System―will be “an integrated, team-based development environment tailored for game production.”
Uh, yeah.
To make some sense of this, we went straight to the source: Boyd Multerer, the product unit manager for XNA. In Microsoft-speak, that means he’s in charge of the developers working on XNA. J Allard may be the chief XNA architect, but Boyd’s in the trenches every day making sure stuff happens. Anyway, according to Boyd, “Real simplified, XNA Studio is Visual Studio for game developers.” Okay, I tell him. Dumb it down for me just a wee bit more. Not displaying any exasperation at all—Boyd is cool like that—he tells me, “The biggest problem that studios have right now is running the team. They have great engineers, but they haven’t invested in how to run the team. Take the artists for example: Can they hand off the latest stuff to each other without having to walk across the building? Are they sure they’re all using the latest build?”
So, where does XNA Studio come in?
“A lot of game developers use Visual Studio. It’s a generic software tool. But, most programs being developed are 98-percent code and 2-percent art—like Microsoft Word, for example. With video games, it’s the exact opposite. Code is only 2 percent of the program. XNA Studio provides the tools that developers need to manage the art.”
Such as?
“Source control, for one. For example: An artist checks out a model, makes his or her changes—let’s say adding texture—and checks it back in. The next artist checks out that updated version and adds lighting effects. There are also tools for bug tracking and project management, so the team knows how much is done and how far they are along in the project.”
“Game developers are doing this stuff now, but they hate it. One of the goals of XNA is that we do the grunt work, so they can build the game.”
Which leads to the unofficial XNA motto: Better games, faster. I ask Boyd if this means games will no longer be delayed.
He chuckles. “Games may still be delayed, but it will be because they’re putting more into the game.”
Game developers are already rocking the cool XNA tools, like Xact and Pix and DirectX. They’ll get a taste of XNA Studio in about a year. J Allard, in his 2005 GDC keynote address, promised to have an early version in developer’s hands at GDC 2006.
We’ll check back with Boyd and the rest of the XNA team around GDC next year!
More about Boyd Here’s Boyd in a nutshell. Wisconsin. Ground pounder. XboxLive™. Ani-Zoo.
Okay, I’ll give you a little more.
Boyd grew up in Wisconsin and wrote his first video game at age 12 on the Timex Sinclair 1000. (Apparently, it was a computer, not a watch.) He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he wrote software to simulate machines and thermodynamics. Why would a person want to do such a thing? “I love machines. I love knowing how things work.”
During summer vacations, he designed vibrating ground compression equipment, or ground pounders. In the meantime he kept designing games for fun. Then, one day it occurred to him, “Wait, why don’t I make the hobby the career?” So, he moved to Seattle and started his own software company, Zephyr Design. He made plug-ins for Pagemaker (yes, he was—gasp!—a Mac guy).
He started working with Microsoft in 1994 and has been a full-time employee since 1997. In August of 2000, he came to Xbox, where he was the developer manager for Xbox Live. Yes, kid. Boyd is the dude who led the team that built Xbox Live—now 1.5 million subscribers strong—from nothing. “That’s the thing I’m most proud of,” Boyd says.
He was the Xbox Live development manager for four years and one week, when he took on XNA. Wasn’t it hard for him to leave his "baby"?
“Well, I’m really good at the beginning of things, and I’d had the same job for four years. I was ready for a new challenge.”
What else can I tell you about Boyd?
Last Great Read: Iain Banks’ The Algebraist.
Best Film Ever: Brazil.
First superhero he could think of: Stainless Steel Rat.
Band he’d like to tour with: Buckethead or I Mother Earth.
Lately, he's been listening to music like Place of Skulls, Probot, 35007, and Ani-Zoo. “At the Xbox launch in Japan, I saw this dude with a bass guitar and an amp on a street corner playing the most amazing stuff I’ve ever heard. It was Ani-Zoo.”
What games blew his mind? (Boyd lit up and babbled back at this question for like 15 minutes—I wrote down as many as I could.)Pathways in the Darkness. “I actually finished it. That’s saying something because there’s a bug in the middle.” Dark Castle on the Mac. Halo, “of course.” Age of Empires, “all of them.” Crystal Quest on the Mac, andSpectre 3D.
