Links to information about best practices for creating Xbox LIVE community games

A couple of weeks ago, a Best Practices for Community Games guide was published on the Creators Club web site that provides a list of suggestions to consider when creating Xbox LIVE Community Games using XNA Game Studio 3.0.  You can find this guide at https://creators.xna.com/en-us/education/bestpractices.  You are not required to follow these guidelines when creating your game, but following these guidelines will add polish to your game that will hopefully make it appeal to more users, increase your sales via Xbox LIVE Community Games, etc.

This best practices guide currently includes information about the topics listed below.  It describes things to consider when designing and building your game, and also has links to relevant samples and documentation topics to provide more details and code snippets to help you get started:

  • The game just works on any TV
  • Trial mode
  • Friendly menu system
  • Consistent controls
  • Audio considerations
  • Setting and handling the default controller
  • Gamer profiles
  • Game representation (thumbnail, screenshots, trailer video, in-game rich presence)
  • Seamless loading and saving
  • Using Xbox LIVE multi-player features
  • Handling special controllers

In addition, Mitch Walker has posted an item on his blog that provides more details about one of the bullet points in the Seamless loading and saving section of the best practices guide.  In his blog post at https://blogs.msdn.com/mitchw/archive/2008/10/15/the-one-about-storage.aspx, he demonstrates how to implement the Guide.BeginShowStorageDeviceSelector API in an asynchronous manner so that your game will not deadlock on systems that have multiple storage devices attached (such as a hard drive and a memory unit).