It's likely many of you are developing your games on windows and then porting to the Xbox 360. Makes sense... However, there are certain things when developing games for an Xbox/TV that are different than windows/ a monitor. One of the most important is adhering to the safe zone of a TV.

Many of the games that are now approved, when played on a TV, are seeing the text for high scores and the HUD as well as at times game play occurring outside of the safe zone. The safe zone is a percentage of the outside portion of a screen that you cannot guarantee will be viewable. For standard def TV's, it can be more than 10% on all sides of the screen. On HDTV's it's normally around 5%.

So as you're developing your games and testing them, pay attention to this. The games are looking great but it's important that people can see their scores...

Ah! Finally someone else who noticed the complete lack of safety zones. For people who don't want to do a lot of calculations / guessing I have uploaded the overlays (with official measurements) I've made for my games. Just render them on top of your game with spriteBatch and you can instantly see if your game is "safe".

For 1280x720 - http://xna.blobz.net/help/safe720.png
For 1920x1080 - http://xna.blobz.net/help/safe1080.png

Simple guide to reading your overlay:

Keep all text inside the inner (100% visible) frame.
Keep all important graphic objects within the middle frame (50% visible)
Everything in the outer frame (25% visible) will probably not be visible on a television (do render here, but not anything important)

And only use the overlay while developing... (Tip:  #IF DEBUG)

I went with a different approach and added a Screen Size slider to my game.  As I do the 'textured quads in a 2d world' thing this just meant zooming my camera in or out a bit.  This way if I play on my sooper dooper 42" plasma it already handles overscan so I set my Screen Size to 100% in game.  If I play on my older TV, I'd lose some objects off screen so I just move the slider down and it moves the camera back and resizes the game dynamically.

The textured quad approach also gives me the advantage of not caring what resolution the user runs at - resizing is all handled pretty much automatically (I do care about aspect ratio though and force a 16:9 widescreen view).

I do lose the SpriteBatch goodness of abstracting tagret platform though.  Might be a issue if I ever do a Zune game I guess.

I also agree.

I've also been noticing non standard button usage.
Press A to start, X to restart.
Diabled back button to escape in some games.

Might I suggest?
This is a very free and open development system,
But certain guidlines should be established.

1) Respect Safe Areas.
2) Start to start and restart a game.
3) Game has a valid icon.
4) Game has a valid exit methodology, menu or back button.

 

When submitting a game there should be a checklist (or just bullets) to remind people these thing. They apply to almost every game. The XNA Team should add it to this website. I guess we can also reject games when something like "How to exit the game" is missing with a comment saying so.

Perhaps select some of the "tech cert" requirements for regular Xbox games, and "bless" them as official requirements for reviewed games?

 

 

Totally agree if we are to take the review process seriously ie, the games should be fit for joe public when this is out of beta them there needs to be minimum standard regarding standard button actions, support of SD/HD etc

 Although it should probably be part of the submision proces for the submitter to tick a box to say they have implemented x, y and z to meet these

I think you guys are misunderstanding the review process. The original post of things you should do to improve the quality of your game is good, but it's up to the individual to decide to follow that advice or not. We are not doing quality control in the review. We are looking for crashes and things that break EULA. Non-standard controls and things displayed outside of the safe area are things that impact the quality of the game and while are good feedback to give, should not be taken into consideration while you are reviewing a game.

Much as I hate to disagree with George I'm going to anyway... but just on the safe zone point. Everything else George says is spot on.

Not respecting safe zones can go either way.... If there are essential parts of the game outside the safezone then you are prefectly allowed to reject based on the unplayable category. However if it just hides part of the score or some non eseential elements then its hard to mark it as unplayable. Right now 'unplayable/crash' is the only category we are allowed to rate against.

For example: if you write space invaders and the ship is right at the bottom of the screen then this will not be visible on a TV since its outside the safe area. This makes it unplayable and should be rejected.

Counter Example: If your high score is off top right edge of the screen then its annoying and will probably get some comments in the forum but should NOT be rejected.

 

Inside Microsoft, I've heard the phrase "we should build a pit of success" which means that the first way you try to do something should be the simplest and easiest and should also be one of the best ways! You should fall into a pit, rather than climb a mountain, and that pit should be filled with gold and/or other goodies. It also means that people should stumble upon things that will help them be successful, they shouldn't have to go looking for them.

With that in mind, I'd like to see something such as Mander's Safe Area Component and other useful tools (screen shot button, FPS counter, etc) find a more prominent home in XNA. Maybe for debug builds we could hijack one of the F-keys for a debug-tools menu. Developers are sure to stumble across them sooner or later :-)

This also reminds me of this feedback item for Game.TitleSafeRegion (closed external? too late to vote?)

And lastly, a lot of people (myself included) are creating high score games and integrating the game state management sample. Maybe a template for "New High Score Game" in VS would safe many people a great deal of time while tricking people into respecting title safe regions?