XBLA guidelines aren't generally available to the public at large; Microsoft would undoubtedly deliver them to you when you got your XBLA contract.

Outside of XBLA, this is what generally comes under the heading of "tribal knowledge". There's not usually anybody who says 'you should do this', but the gaming public has been conditioned to expect certain sequences of game start and end screens, and the marketing and advertising gurus of the industry have determined that certain sequences work better than others.

I think pretty much everyone in the industry learns what works best for their game by playing other games like it, and imitating whatever they do.

spookyjon:

There's a general list of guidelines for community games on XNAWiki here.  These are, of course, just guidelines, but it's a helpful thing to have at hand when making your game.

Thanks Again!

Official Guidelines, eh?

Microsoft offers Class Library Guidelines on MSDN. Now, naturally an XNA game is not a Class Library so not everything will apply nor will it all be good advice for a game but you can still salvage some good programming design from the pages and it includes very simple explanations for why they recommend what they do. There are even "bad code" examples of what not to write which should be true in just about any application.

If that's not enough, you can download FxCop which is a tool that analyzes your source code and flags any Microsoft Guideline violations. And this little app works hard, it'll catch pretty much any violation that can possibly be detected by a computer. Again, not every violation applies to XNA (who cares that your game won't compile in Visual BASIC?) and some guidelines ought to be relaxed a bit (public property getters on private fields in high-performance code?), and it may be noisy, but it won't steer you off track.

Really the key is to take established guidelines about the way the .Net Framework works and temper that against the Compact Framework for Xbox360 to form a complete picture about what guidelines to follow.

Eli Tayrien:

You may also want to have a look at Mitch's GameFest talk, Creating Great Community Games. There's a lot of info in there you may find interesting.