Our team is just 2 people, and we created our entry from scratch in 3 months.

Aaron:

Age 29, from the Detroit, MI area, Art Director/marketing guy by trade. I did all of the art (animated sprites, hand painted backgrounds and foregrounds, U.I., titl and loading screens, etc.), music, and writing in the game. I did most of the overriding design.

Paul

Age 26 (?) from....somewhere in the U.K. Programmer. He did all of the programming; the original engine, physics, scripting, etc.and he did most of the sequence design.

 

Basically, we worked up a demo in our free time earlier in the year for what we wanted to do with XNA and kind of sketched out some plans, while saving up. When Dream Build Play was announced, Paul stopped picking up programming contracts and I stopped taking work from my main client and he flew over here and we pounded out our game day and night for a few months while eating Ramen noodles, and got pretty far in it, I think.

 

The link for our game is in my sig.

Hi everyone! My name is Silvino. My friends call me Silver. I'm 33. Spain. My entry is Another Puzzle.

Hi my name is mike, i'm 27 and am living near chicago illinois.

I worked on this by myself in my spare time. I am currently a full time carpenter/contractor.

I never studied programming in school or anything like that, always been just a hobby.

My other hobby is fighting, specifically muay thai. I train when i have time which recently hasn't been much.

My submission is:

Rocket

I'm Caliban Darklock (yes it's my real name), from Puyallup, Washington.

I've been a professional software developer for 18 years, and have released a few game projects during that time. Nothing major: the online BBS door game Dopewars in 1993 (which was free), another BBS door game called Murder Manor in 1995 (which sold all of four copies), and in 1999 I purchased the rights to Garth Bigelow's Ultimate Universe (which is freeware pending a commercial rewrite; there are contractual obligations outstanding on that, but we're in contact and have an equitable arrangement). Between 2000 and 2002 I was working on turning my company into a full-bore game studio, but didn't get much farther than having Sony and Nintendo reps on deck who were always happy to reject any proposal I had. I was also talking with Sega, but the Dreamcast went kerflooey (it's a technical term) before those went anywhere.

XBox development go on my radar toward the end of that time, but the game studio thing wasn't working out and the hardware was unproven, so I "went corporate" and did ISV work as a Microsoft Partner for the next couple years. Mostly intranet web applications for small business. On April 7 of 2006, I joined the ranks of contingent staff at Microsoft, and have been working either there or for myself ever since - at the end of each contract, I take some time off and work on my own stuff until the savings run out, and then I go back.

I'm a 1 man band.
Name: Lawrence Hodson (aka Sharky,   aka. atomicSharky)
Age: 38
Sex: YES PLEASE, er... Male
Status: currently solo Dad with a day job

My game: Air Legends
I started Air Legends as a fun little home exercise to get some .NET 2.0 experience in late 2006 (after my employer left me to rot doing .NET 1.1 with no end in site). Pretty much right when XNA first came out.

The music was composed and performed by a close friend.

2 of us.

Both in the Chicago area. Both early middle aged.

 

Sean - 24% Programmer..

I've been writing code for far longer then I can remember. (Went to biz school for the record.)

If you remember BGI graphics, you're in my league. Otherwise, bugger off.

Don - 25% Graphics

Don has all the fancy credentials. (Went to a fancy art school, worked for a couple big studios, hated corporata) Gave it all up to move to the midwest, make games and drink beers with an old friend.

Hi

My team consists of just me, doing everything, the coding, graphics, audio and testing.

MY name is Ben Sleat, I'm 32 and live in Horsham, UK (25 miles from London).

I'm married and have a 9 month old baby daughter, which means I have very little spare time to work on projects such as my game.

I've got a degree in Computer Science, and I work as a Technical Architect designing and developing software for a call recording company.

I have been developing my own games as a hobby since I was about 12 years old, starting writing games in assembly language on the Spectrum and Atari XE. NExt I moved onto writing games in 68000 assembly language on the Atari ST before eventually moving onto the PC.

The last game I started (Back in 2000) was similar to Age of Empires, but rendered in 3D (But still viwered overhead), with a zoomable interface similar to that used in Supreme Commander. Unfortunately I eventually realised that the project was too big for me to complete and its been on hold ever since.

My DBP game "Supernova Storm" is the first game I've worked on since then, and I made a concious effort to choose a game that I knew I could finish, rather than being over ambitious and not getting it done.

Here is a video of my game:
Supernova Storm Video (45Mb)

or lower quality version here:
Supernova Storm on MSN

Wow, it seems some people have put a lot of effort into their videos too. I'm going to update mine later today I barely gave a glimps of the game in comparison to others.

My name is Oscar Kozlowski and I'm a 24 year old PhD student based in London, UK. I have literally just finished Artoon which is the culmination of just 3 and half weeks (hard) work. I did everything except the music (credit goes to Mattias Haggstrom Gerdt) and now deservedly am enjoying a G&T and browsing the amazing games everyone else has produced!

I have created a new post detailing Artoon in full detail (including a ccgame download link), but the post apparently has to be moderator approved. If anyone here has such powers, I'd appreciate it.

- Oscar

My name is Edward D. I live in Durban in South Africa, I have a full time job, so spent any free time working on the game.
The art was done by Neil J. who lives in London and also has a full time job.
Was a bit of a challenge being in a different continent throughout the entire project, but we happy with what we managed to achieve.

The game we submitted is inDuna.

 

Hey whats up everyone, my name is Matt Castellana and I created Cube X. Im gonna be 26 in November and I currently live out here in Burbank in sunny Los Angeles, California. I am an actor, musician and now back at doing game development ever since XNA was released. I have been working on and off on Cube X since May '07 and it has been an awesome, and sometimes painful ride. I was showing off Cube X to Ross Erickson and some of the top dogs over at Vivendi/Sierra Online earlier this year in hopes of a publishing contract with them. They wanted me to come back with a 2nd prototype but unfortunately, with the whole merger with Activision, Sierra Online is going to be sold off or shut down and at this point, they aren't taking on any new titles. Thats when I decided to give DBP a shot and worked hard to get the submission completed.

I have been programming since the age of 12 with everything from early Basic, Pascal, all the way through VB, C/C++/C#, .Net. I started doing simple applications and programming databases but then moving onto other projects including video game development. I have also been doing 3D modeling since the age of 9 using the early DOS 3D Studio, TrueSpace, and another program I forget. Creating in general was a passion as well as a form of expression for me from an early age. It didnt matter if it was drawing, 3d modeling, animation, music, I just wanted to create as much as I could. If XNA didnt come out, I dont think I would've gone back to it to give it a shot. After doing my first build and seeing how well XNA was put together, Ive been hooked ever since. Cube X was motivated by revisiting an old dream of mine and to help pay the bills so I can continue to do what I moved out to Cali to do in the first place. Ive given up everything I have to make this dream a reality and it was worth every moment. Whats life worth if you don't take a risk? Great job everyone and good luck!!!

Im a 27 year old Programmer from Germany and i submitted Solar Struggle.

I had to do everthing alone because good Artists are hard to find (at least here in Germany).
I think my programmer's art is not the worst one, but i really suck at Modeling and have no time to invest those 3 Years minimum to get competetive in this field.
So i had to use free available 3D Models and license some music tracks for a few Bucks.
At least non-exclusive Music licenses are really affordable today, starting at 30$ for really good quality music Tracks.

My final goal ist to get into the professional Game Development Industry, and i think its just a matter of time when i can leave the boring 'not-game-software'-Business behind me... ;-)

As a team of 1, I'm a 40 year old IT Director from the UK. My submission this year was "Tail Gun Charlie". I've been writing games since the early 90's (back in the day, assembler was the only way - C# and XNA makes game writing so simple now!).

You can find some pictures of my entry this year at http://duckocide.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!BADD8AB19402B892!223.entry

Apart from the purchase of 1 model, everything else (programming, graphics, music and sound effects) is my own work.

 

Hey there,

My name is Ted de Vries i am 26 years old and submitting the game: "The Incredible Evolving Robot"! The goal of the game is to kill a constantly growing/evolving boss as fast as possible! Here's a video of the game:

The Incredible Evolving Robot

This has mostly been a one man effort, most work was done in the few hours i had after work. I must say, with the limited time/resources i had i'm quite proud of the results! In addition to the ccgame file i have sent Microsoft a "60 seconds of gameplay summary" design document to clarify the game mechanics. You can check it out on my website:

Design document

I know the feeling of relief that comes from the submission (enough that I spent a good half-week or so without seeing any XNA code).

Seriously though, I'm basically a solo entrant from Melbourne, Australia.  I've come from a background in general web application development (which isn't using .NET in any form), and basically picked up XNA has a bit of a hobby.

In fact, it was only until the week or so before the contest closed that I was actually in a position to enter (when some circumstances happened to give me a ton of free time).

At this stage, I'm planning to polish it up a bit further (including getting it cleaned up for Windows), and hopefully get it onto XBLCG whenever it's available to submit from in my little corner of the world.

I've put up a copy of the Xbox build on a little site I've knocked up, which is up at: http://tinyurl.com/48g5rd

Hello,

Southern California here
I believe that we might have one of the most unusual teams in the competition :)

Dad (49) Full-time programmer (not games) Also I am probably the oldest guy here!
Son(16) Probably the youngest
Daughter(19) and one of the few women...

Swarm took us 3 months and was based on the Robot Game which helped us out tremendously. 

 
Swarm Video

Hi!

This is the Battle Tennis team, four guys from Caracas, Venezuela.

Jose Alberto Gomez (24) (Me) Artist. I did all the artwork and game design.

Alejandro Martinez (24) In real life he's an animator too, but he had the hard work of having to do mostly programming (since at the beginning we just didn't had any programmers at all, it was just us throwing code around) . That, however, served as a great link between the art and the code and worked out great. He did most of the graphics code(post process, particles, models, animation etc).

Juan Campa (19) Hardcore programmer, he entered a little later in the project and besides doing all the physics, AI, cameras and so on, he also had the hard work of cleaning all the "artist code" there was ; ).

Alex Perez (24) He's a programmer too, but also an awesome musician , he did all the music and sound design.

 

It helped a lot that we all had some programming background and all had some experience with 3d graphics, so we could all understand what we were doing and needed from each other, it's a great team and I'm very proud of it. 

 

Alejandro and I started dotslash as an animation studio a couple of years ago. We have always wanted to work with videogames, and XNA was what recently made it possible to even consider it, so huge thanks to the XNA team!

Hey, Im david webb, and my team made Hexothermic!

Spent about two weeks on it, mostly early morning stuff with my team mate, michael strangeway.

Currently also working on Yo-Ho Kablammo! for XBLA, which came second last year in DBP.

We are based in Huddersfield, UK. We are also final year students there, doing computer games programming.

If you watch the video, please turn up your sound because the video is, well, rubbish lol very ill pc at the mo.

anyone who wants to chat,

 my gametag is BIG DAVE 23

my email is bigdave23_2003@hotmail.com, add me to messenger if ya like!

So much talent this year, but i am shocked at the video of battle tennis. stunning.

P.S there should be a big party or get together for competitors or something, Microsoft if your reading, "hint hint" ;-)

did anyone else go to gamefest at the chelsea football ground?

We made Candy Time.

We're four people, aged 25-30, one female. Three of us work in the game development industry, all of us have made games as a hobby before (we made Ragu last year).

We all come from Gothenburg in Sweden, and we all have a college/university education in computer science or similiar.

We've worked pretty hard on the game, especially the last week! Didn't take any time off or anything, all done in the spare time after work (and sometimes during lunch hour).

Quinchoncho:

Hi!

... Battle Tennis ...

Wow ... What a game!!! Artwork is absolutely first rate! Game play looks brilliant .... You'd get my vote for a winner!

Greetings from Germany,

 we are the "Monkeys in Space Suits" and creators of MegalopolisHD. Some guys from our team started Megalopolis as a 2D game for the Imagine Cup 2008 and it became a world wide finalist. The 2D version is part of the Xbox LIVE Community Games Beta (http://catalog.xna.com/GameDetails.aspx?releaseId=215). After returning from Paris we joined all our forces together and created MegalopolisHD, an enhanced 3D version of our game for Dream Build Play 2008. Our team consists of one artist, one game designer / artist, two programmers, one guy with many responsibilities ;), one musician, and a sound designer.
All in all, we invested 3 months to develop the two different versions of our game.

Here is a video of our game:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=63565a7c-11ad-4a45-92d1-71e099a37a16

and the short version if you are in a hurry ;)

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=1ba68f47-560c-4dfc-be37-b618643c6c2c

Regards,
 Ingo

Team:
Xona Games

Members:
Jason Doucette, age 33
Matthew Doucette, age 33
We are twins, been programming since 7 (26 years), and have been making games since then.

Game:
Duality ZF
2D shoot 'em up (overhead / vertically scrolling shooter / shmup) with emphasis on gameplay, arcade action, quick reflexes.
April 2009 teaser

cool game! very nice

Our team is just 4 people,We are from Chile, Our name is 'Coipo Studios', took 3 days of development:

Proyecto Nutria - Dia 3 from Elvis Brevi on Vimeo.

I'm a team of one over here, from Seattle Washington.

My game is called Balloon Blocks, I just submitted it today.

Balloon Blocks Video.