Our XNA exported game is live!

Hey all,

If you follow Clickteam on facebook, by now you may have noticed the great news that we have our first game live on the xbox marketplace that was made entirely with MMF & the beta exporter!

I noticed Chris Street was asking about how we handled the evil checklist. The answer is...even though we followed the guidelines as closely as possible, many users in the peer review process found problems that meant we had to resubmit our game in peer review many times.

If you can believe it, the first time we submitted what we thought at the time was our final build, was back in early June.

So it spent about 3 months in peer review, with constant tweaking and fixing.

Some useful advice I can give:

When you submit a game into peer review, all it takes is just two users finding something that does not comply with the evil checklist, and the game will fail. You then must wait 7 - 10 days before you can resubmit.

So advice #1 is... try and make sure the game truly is complete before you submit your game into peer review. The more times it fails, the less other users will take you seriously, and give you their time.

Advice #2 is submit the game into playtest before peer review. We did not do this, and many people on apphub will think you are ignoring the "right way of doing things" if you go straight into peer review, especially if they find problems with your game that would have easily been spotted in playtest.

Advice #3 is...get/borrow four xbox controllers (wired or wireless, does not matter) and make sure you test your game on a sdtv and confirm all text is still readable, all important gameplay elements such as HUD are visible.

In other words...if we had made sure the game was playable on an sdtv, and worked with all four xbox pads, we probably would have been approved back in June.

Every day I see other peoples games failing for the same reason.



Final bit of advice, that seriously makes all the difference, is peer review as many peoples games as you can. And in as much depth as you can. I spent a couple of days doing long, detailed peer reviews and we were live within just a few days of our final submission into peer review. Do not be afraid to fail other users, as long as the fail is valid in relation to the evil checklist.

You get an experience points rating on the apphub forum that slowly diminishes over time. You earn points for reviewing other peoples games, posting in the forum, and successfully submitting a game that gets approved. You lose points by not obeying the forum rules (such as posting "please review my game").

So probably the most worthwhile thing you can do right now if you intend to submit a game in the near future, is spend the time to review a game each day, or at least a few each week, build up your exp rating, and of course, submit a game into playtest even if it is a very early demo. Because then you can talk about the game, earn peoples trust, and build a place in the community.

And here is the link to our game! It is doing well!

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Zombie-Racers/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550949

Hahah I posted about it to Jeff several hours ago - congrats!

Wow, congratulations!!! :D
It's funny, because yesterday I saw this game in the marketplace, and I couldn't imagine it was made in MMF2!
I wish you to have success!

Uh congrats... I guess... But you released a game (and you sold it) made with a tool that is in beta test and that is not your property... I'm not sure this is 100% legal and the clickteam will not be as happy as you...

Congrats!! We will purchase the game today to show some support.

Cool!

Please during the beta testing give Francois or I some heads up on when you want to submit a game for release.
Perhaps you told Francois :) -- I will go bother him to tell me whats going on :)

It is nice to know the beta is in such a good form that it was accepted by Microsoft -- Nice Job!

Thanks to everyone who had a positive comment!

Yes, of course we checked with Francois first. He was very excited and pleased that we achieved this release with beta software. I have been chatting to him privately throughout the development of this game.

Congratulations on the release! I'm downloading the demo as I type this. :)

One thing I noticed, the game demo uses the 8 minute time allowance. Will there be a way to force the user to only play a set number of levels before they have to purchase the full version to continue? This applies to all xna runtime releases.

I went and bought it on my xbox.

Very fun little game.
I was a tad sad to see MMF or Clickteam didn't get a shout out in the credits :( but I will live :)

Is the music in the game a copyright concern or I guess you licensed it from somewhere? Not sure I understand the copyright on it but it sure sounds really good and something you would hear on the radio.