So, what has got me blogging again? Well, the news that EVERYONE will be able to write games for the new XBox One, that’s what!!
If I am honest, the past year or so have not been great for me in terms of how Microsoft have been. I don’t think they have meant it, but they have given the impression that indie developers didn’t mean a lot to them. After the awesome work they did with XNA, to then abandon that framework without giving people who have invested time and money into it was in my view just plain wrong. Also, what I have found disheartening is that Microsoft, in the area of games development seem to be climbing down the technology tree to C++. I don’t deny that C++ was, and still is, a very powerful language (started out in 95 as a C/C++ developer), I also get that all the big entities in the games industry have all there development aligned with C++, but, and I hope I am not the only one that can see this, the present is .NET, and when I say .NET I really mean C#.
Microsoft has started the ball rolling with ID@Xbox, where if you want early access to a “development kit”, this is because on the launch of the new console we wont immediately be able to use them as development kits, but we will later in the year. This early access is open to everyone, and if you are accepted you will get an XBox One to start developing on. In this early stage though, Microsoft will probably be more likely to give you access if you have already written and released games in the past, so if you don’t get accepted, don’t worry, we will all have dev kits at some stage just be buying the console.
I am hoping that we will be able to use C# on the new XBox One, but I suspect to start with it will be C++ if you want to get access to all the lovely things that the new console will have.
I guess this is the only thing worrying me at the moment, what languages will we be able to use, if it’s not just C++, will the other languages have the same level of access that C++ will have??
Either way, I see this as a great step in the right direction, and I am hopeful for how this could pan out, it’s good to feel excited about something Microsoft is doing again.
You can follow the ID@XBox on twitter too [https://twitter.com/ID_Xbox] oh, and if you have not found me on there yet, you can follow me here.
I am going to blog my journey through this new XBox One world, write articles on others in the same situation as me, and once I can write something for the console, start putting some samples up again :D
See you again soon, fellow XBox One Indie adventurer ;)
