It works! XNA on the 360

Aaron on the XBOX 360

Originally uploaded by aaronlinne.

That’s right.

XNA was launched today (msdn.com/xna). I haven’t touched the XNA tools since September, before the second beta went out. I saw all the problems people were having with the transition from alpha to beta, so I didn’t want to get stuck.

Well let me say that XNA rocks.

In about 2 hours I was able to write the neccessary code to place my head on the screen, move it around and, of course, make its mouth open and close. It’s all the first steps of my first real game.

Amidst all the questions of work, career and studies, it was a simply awesome experience to site down for a couple of hours and see something through. And as cool as writing programs on a PC is, there is a huge amount of joy in writing something to run on a video game system.

When I was a young child, my dad tried to learn BASIC in order to make a game for the IntelliVision. He told me once that he was going to make a game for me and my sister. Unfortunately, he never quite got around to it.

But here I am, 20-some years later, and I have the beginning workings of a game. I can wait to see what comes out of XNA not just from myself, but from the whole XNA Community.