Hi everyone,

I’m a belgian student who is trying to get his degree of Bachelor of Graphic and Digital Media, main subject Multimedia Production.
I'm writing a thesis about XNA. For this thesis I'm investigating if XNA can be used for developing serious games.

Feel free to discuss the question "Is XNA suitable for serious games ?" in this thread. Please also fill in my survey which you can find here. For people who speak dutch, go here.

The survey originally was intended for companies, so it can occur that some questions don't relate to you. If you encounter such a question and it's a required field, just fill in ?. At the end you'll also find that Company is a required field. If you're not working at a game company, just fill in none.

I'm hoping to recieve replies at this thread and filled in surveys!

Best regards,
Jens Wouters

PS: english isn't my native language, so please forgive me if I write/have written mistakes

XNA was more intendet to be for hobbyists and students but if you want to make a more "serious" game I'm sure you can do that too.
But bigger companies are obviously not going to use it because they already have great engines made in C++,
and because of that I think XNA will remain to hobbyists and students for a while longer.
But I think there's a great advantage for smaller groups of people who wants to make their own game in a short amount of time and without the complexitivity of C++.
But yes, I definitly think you can make a "serious" game in XNA.

I think you need to define "serious". Do you mean a game that makes it to the shelves of your local game store? Or do you mean profitable? Or do you mean a game that can be distributed to the masses via XBL? There's a few good articles from the recent GDC talking about getting XNA games to players via XBL and the upcoming XNA game portal thing.

Also, there's lot of "serious" games, that never make it to the shelves, but they are still serious and make profits. Look at XBL Arcade games, some of those are utter crap, but since they are there and available does that make them serious? There's some XNA games that are better and higher quality than some published arcade titles which could be considered serious in some terms.

I think that XNA is designed for hobby developers and there's some indy developers making some games (look at some of the DBP entries). Maybe in a few years, you'll see a "A" game studio with something.

You may also want to try to post your survey to ZiggyWare's news site (www.ziggyware.com). I (and probably others) subscribe to ZiggyWare's RSS feed and you might get a wider audience.

In general 'serious games' doesn't mean a game you or I would buy and play but a game like application that is used for learning or simulation... war simulators, traffic simulators, escape route training, etc Checkout this site if you want to know more http://www.seriousgames.org/index2.html

Could you? Sure... the wholepoint of serious games is that they use game like technology...

I'm sorry if it wasn't clear about what I mean with serious games.

The ZManiac is right, serious games are games that have a purpose other than entertainment.

XNA is great for making games, but you can actually do so much more with it. Hence my investigation.

I think you could use it for serious games then. It seems to me that the logic and coding is more important in those types of simulations than the graphics and the logic will be the same whether you are using XNA, DX, or whatever you choose.

I'd never heard the serious game term till Jon Watte used it to describe what I'm doing in another thread.   For me, the goal is not entertainment, but for me it is still desired that the means to the goal are still entertaining, so XNA GSE is perfectly suited. (short info blog on my spaces link below)

Best,

Byron

yes :)

XNA is a blessing for indie developers and new PC/XBOX only games.

The only people who "cannot" use XNA at the moment are big multiplatform studios with legacy codebases.

Personally, i wouldn't even be able to start our game if it wasnt for XNA. I programmed the whole game from scratch by myself because XNA made it feasible.

XNA can ressurect the "lone developer" days. I look at C++ and unamanged DirectX/OpenGL now and i say never again!

Games or applications that are written in flash and director that meant to be used off the internet could easily be written with XNA as well (yes i worked for a company that did exactly that!)

Coming from the Serious Games business myself, I wholeheartedly agree that XNA is a great tool for that industry.

Serious Games suffer from the problem that to be really useful, they need to be as realistic as possible.  They have difficulties because in order to make a realistic simulation, you either need an advanced game engine (such as HalfLife2) or need to develop your own.  Advanced engines are generally out, because their liscenses and prices are optimized for wide distribution of games rather than the market for serious games, which is often school districts, law enforcement, or other small government agencies with small budgets.  Developing your own engine, however, costs time and money, and advanced developers and artists that don't come cheap.

Enter XNA, which allows rapid development in a managed library, along with a solid library of easy to use game essentials.  The liscense is good, allowing you to create a windows-based commercial serious game for a fraction of the cost.  The number of programmers needed is reduced (though art requirements remain the same), and the amount of development that can be done in short time increased.  In all, XNA is perfect for the serious games industry.

I've been writing a commercial quality game engine by myself for awhile now in XNA, the engine originally started a long time ago with DirectX 8/9 in C++, migrated to Managed DirectX when I learned enough to do so, then to XNA. I think XNA is easier to work with than DirectX, you generally have the same tools available, but code readability was wicked good in XNA, theres only a few parts of it that I had to toy with to figure out exactly what was going on.

I think XNA is more suited to an indipendant developer trying to create a serious game, than DirectX or OpenGL (haven't tried any other SDKs so don't know about others). It also integrates much cleaner with .Net, which is a huge bonus considering how well the fast access collection classes in .Net work with hierarchial data like you find in a game engine. The file handling of .Net especially with sql and xml databases is real nice, dunno how many times I had to reload my file pointers when I worked with Managed DirectX because a resource cache somehow repositioned them when picking up freshly loaded files.

The only thing I miss about turning my back on game development in C/C++ is the templates, the C# semi-equivalents just don't hold a torch to the usefulness of a well designed template.

Of coursr i think you can create big games in XNA.

Chack out these game created for Imagine cup Game development compatition

http://imaginecup.com/Community/forums/t/7325.aspx

 

Imagine cup Game development Semi Finalist

http://uditha.wordpress.com/