1. How To Finish a Game With XNA Joel Martinez

2. Experimentation VS Finishing a Game

3. How To Make Games Inspiration Prototype Play Testing Design Do It! Polish Release!

4. Some Motivations 1 I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 160k 2 Avatar Drop 117k 3 RC-AirSim 74k Top 20 Games "they all do one thing and do it very, very well: They fulfill the desire of gamers for something which they can't get on XBLA and would never see on a disc-based game. They're like a sugary snack and a can of pop - an instant hit of fun and refreshment. " DrMistry

5. The Spark Find Inspiration in everyday life Make a Statement, or Focus on an Interesting Mechanic

6. Don't Follow the Masses

10. The Prototype Single Focus Prototypes Make more than one prototype Be prepared to throw away code Don't be afraid to Suck!

11. Tech

12. PlayTest Free Testing, use it! No Penalty for Uploading unfinished game concepts Community Based o PlayTest other games o Be nice to reviewers

13. The Design Put together different prototypes Avoid "The Game Design Document" Find "The X" http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=717 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=717 http://theoryoffun.com

16. Be Prepared to Cut Features

17. The Grind Plan out your work Agile in Stages Don't Give Up!

18. You Can't Finish Them All

19. Plan Early for the Check List No "Official" TCR Process Best Practices for Indie Games http://creators.xna.com/en-us/education/bestpractices The Evil CheckList: http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/19525.aspx

20. Technical Issues Avoid Crashes at All Costs Avoid excessive allocations http://codecube.net/2010/01/xna-resource-pool/ Profile to avoid GC Problems o XNA Framework Remote Performance Monitor for XBox 360 o CLR Profiler

21. Layout/Design Choose 1280x720 on the XBox XBox and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series will automatically scale up or down if necessary. On Windows, must handle different resolutions http://www.david-amador.com/2010/03/xna-2d-independent- resolution-rendering/

22. Safe Area Don't be the "Works on My Machine!" guy Title Safe Area: 20% Gutter graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.TitleSafeArea http://blogs.msdn.com/manders/archive/2006/11/28/helper-class- to-show-video-safe-areas.aspx

23. Input Considerations Use Standard Input conventions o A to accept o B to go back or cancel Use "Press Start" to determine what controller the player is using http://creators.xna.com/en-US/contentpack/controller

24. The Final Stretch Keep Polishing More PlayTests as you add levels o Take the feedback seriously, these are game players too o But be careful not to burn out the testeres Peer review... if you fail, fix the issue and resubmit Don't give up! Marketing!

25. Chop More Features!!!

26. Thank You! joelmartinez@gmail.com @joelmartinez http://codecube.net