Congratulations to Torpex's Schizoid release!
Thursday, July 10 2008
BIG congrats goes out to Torpex's release yesterday of their fantastic Schizoid game on Xbox LIVE Arcade. It's not only an amazing splash of visual eye candy, it will definitely activate your right and left brain (and hands) in an ever-increasing set of challenges. You also have to admit, any game that can win the PAX 10 has got to be worth investigating!
It's enormously disappointing,however, that the people now running XNA Creator's Club site continue to use the main page feature to promote a "Game ON!" Sweepstakes rather than take a day or two to have a promotional image congratulating Torpex on their accomplishment. So why would I admonish the XNA team about this? Because Schizoid was written entirely using the XNA Framework. The Creator's Club site doesn't even have an interview article in their Spotlight section for it. That's disappointing, because I remember the strong partnership the XNA team had with Torpex and how closely we (ok, not "we" anymore) worked with them. I hinted about their gameplay style back in early 2007, and was thoroughly impressed by the zeal that Bill Dugan and Jamie Fristrom had about Schizoid. They built an amazing demo and showed it to the XNA and XBLA group, and the rest was history. Well, kinda -- turns out that their game was doing some amazing things that pushed the envelope of the XNA Framework, and the XNA Developer Connection Team (the same folks you would work with if you were building a retail Xbox 360 game) went into high gear to work with Torpex and the XNA Game Studio team to get things in top-notch condition. The end result is not only a fun game to play, but also helped the XNA Game Studio team identify and resolve some performance issues.
So...XNA Community team....where is the love for Torpex now? Tell them "Thank you" by promoting ther game for a few days, or run a spotlight article. Do something. XNA Game Studio is nothing without a great partner and customer relationship!
P.S. - Don't forget to follow my painfully expensive relocation trip to San Antonio by following me on twitter!
3 comment(s)
Yup, but it underscores the internal difference between the Creators Club site and the XNA team blog. I could go into all the sordid details, but let's just say that there are some internal disconnects and leave it at that.
Ive been waiting for this for ages. as an XNA user who wants to get my own games on the arcade one day, seeing a fully commercial game built with the same tools im useing is just great encoragement. i never relly expected tosee anything about it appear on the xna creators club site, not more than an interview or too. The creators lub has allways struck me as being seperate from the devlopors tools.
I was kind of surprised by that myself. Just a single thread in the forums started by a community member. It has been announced on the team blog finally, but still nothing on the Creator's site.
Planning on downloading it tonight myself. I can't wait to see how the first XNA game came out!