Lessons learned getting a game on Xbox Live Community Games
So it's been a couple of weeks now since Dr. Popper was approved for Xbox Live Community games. I?m pleased to announce that it made the top 10 for sales last week (ok barely, it was number 10). Before you ask, I don?t know what that means yet, I don't think that actual sales numbers are being shared yet, so it might be less than 10 sales, or a thousand, no idea yet.
When bringing Dr. Popper to Xbox, there were two major efforts. One was since it was a mouse-based windows game, I had to implement a gamepad based interface. This also included having to create a menu system. I plan on releasing my gamepad classes soon which I found very helpful to give the gamepad an easier interface. I also created a keyboard version of these so that you can test on Windows without a gamepad. If you're interested drop me a note and I can get these to you sooner.
It's critical that you're able to test your Xbox game on Windows since you won't want to have to deploy your game each time you want to test. This means you need an Xbox Gamepad to use on your PC. You have two options, my preferred one is using an Xbox 360 Wireless Controller with an Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows. This is the cheapest way to go if you already have a wireless controller. Your other option is to get a wired Xbox 360 Controller which will plug directly into your USB port and off you go.
All you need to do to get your Xbox game to compile for windows is to right click on the project in the Solution Explorer and say "Create a Copy of Project for Windows".
Play some other Xbox games and pay attention to button presses especially in the menu system. When you?re playing a game on Xbox, the button presses become second nature and you may not even think about them. Make sure that your game follows these conventions.
Play other Xbox Live Community Games, preferably the more popular ones. Pay attention to game flow and how they implement their trial mode.
The other major effort was to implement storage properly and gamer services. This can be pretty involved just because there are so many combinations. The player can be not logged in, logged in but not logged into Live, logged in to Live but not allowed to purchase, and someone could sign in or sign out at any time during the game. As for storage, someone may have a hard drive, or a memory unit, or both, and may remove or insert the memory unit while the game is in progress.
Check out Spyn Doctor's Evil Checklist for stress testing. It contains many things to look out for and suggestions on how to avoid these pitfalls.
Most importantly, submit your game for Playtest before release. Even if you think the game is solid, playtest will probably flush out a few bugs that may even be missed in peer review, and then you would have a buggy game going out to the public. You only have one chance to make a good first impression.
Speaking of this, one issue I ran into was that since storage doesn't carry over from Trial mode to Full Game mode, I disabled high scores in Trial mode. This led players to believe that the game didn't have high scores support and this cost me some sales. The next release will have high scores enabled in Trial mode but tells users that they won't carry over. So it's very important to make sure that in trial mode the user knows exactly what's in the full version and you represent all of its features.