I sat down today to check out what’s inside XNA Games Studio, the platform which Microsoft touts as the future of bedroom games coding (well, sort of). It’s still in beta 2, and it doesn’t support XBox 360 executables yet, but it works fairly well. I ported my old C# game experiment without much pain, and you can check the results here. Don’t expect a lot of polish in the code or the actual game: the platform is still beta after all, so I didn’t want to spend more than a few hours with it. You will need Visual C# Express and the XNA Game Studio Express in order to compile and run it.

The subscription model they are going to use for XBox 360 XNA development is likely to put many people off. There’s plenty of bedroom game development communities going on already, so I’m not sure this XNA thing will become a big success, but we will see how far Microsoft wants to go with it.

Here are some links to XNA sites:

http://www.xnaspot.com/
http://www.xnaresources.com/

Edit: There’s a video montage showing a few homebrew games and then some material by Torque and the XNA demo teams.