I know Microsoft is the company many love to hate. But dam do they keep impressing me with their achievements. And I’m not talking about vision, everybody has enough of that. I’m talking about the actual C# and XNA deal, the day-to-day work and actually finishing projects with this. From vision to reality, from concept to production. I believe C#/XNA is setting a standard that will leave most behind. In all my years of game development I’ve never seen a framework so intuitive, powerful and straightforward.
I downloaded the XNA beta on August 30; looked at it… it looked ok. Then a few days ago I created a new XNA Game Project and four days later I had a game framework, entity editor, and a few entity types (camera, grid and volumes). Worth mentioning is the fact that this was my first time using C#. Although, I do build frameworks and games for a living, which helps me code known patterns, I did find features that opened a new window of refactoring. I’m also creating a script engine using as language C#, which in this case might not mean scripting, but realtime compiling. And the results are promising.
The XNA Content Pipeline will be the deciding factor. It will make it or break it. Let’s see what the giant comes up with. I’m a bit scared ’cause my expectations are high.