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Martin has long been interested in games and programming since a very young age. He recently founded Retroburn Game Studios in 2009, in an effort to form a collaboration of amateur developers and artists with a view to break into the games industry.
Using XNA and developing games for XBLIG, Martin manages multiple projects ranging from simple 2D learning games to full-blown FPS games. Retroburn Game Studios are soon to release their first two games and have more exciting projects in development.
Martin will be sharing his knowledge and experience, and will demonstrate how to work closely with a small team and minimal budget to produce high quality games using XNA and related technologies. |
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Nick Hawes is a Lecturer in Intelligent Robotics at the University of Birmingham. After doing a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science he did a PhD on AI for video games sponsored by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. Following this he spent some time at Media Lab Europe (MIT Media Lab's European partner) before returning to Birmingham to work on large-scale intelligent robotics projects. His main research interests are information-processing architectures for intelligent systems, and the integration of motivation, planning and reactive systems to produce goal-directed behaviour in dynamic environments.
Nick will present an overview of AI techniques suitable for goal-directed decision making in video game agents. |
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We told you it would be something cool, and it certainly is... Paul Foster will be talking about XNA 3.1 on Zune HD, including the XNA Game Studio 3.1 Zune Extensions. These add the following functionality to the product:
- The ability to target and develop for the Zune HD media player.
- The addition of new Touch APIs to the XNA Framework for use on the Zune HD.
- The addition of new Accelerometer APIs to the XNA Framework for use on the Zune HD.
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A C# developer for five years, and a musician for fifteen, Paul is going to leave the graphics to the experts, instead focussing on adding audio to your XNA game, and how to get 3D sound effects whizzing around your surround sound set-up!
Paul never had a Spectrum; he was strictly a BBC B man! |
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Steve started programming in BASIC on a Spectrum 128K +3. When the J key wore out, his Speccy was replaced with an Amiga A500. AMOS, C and playing many, many games were his focus. Then came his 486. With the help of the PCGPE, he tinkered with graphics and games in MS-DOS. After many versions of pixel fire, spinning cubes and spinning cubes on fire, he moved on to DirectX and then XNA and has been tinkering ever since.
Steve has been developing on the .NET platform since 1.0 and is now a Technical Architect for enterprise web applications by Delcam PLC.
Amongst other things, Steve will be talking about the inner workings of the SpriteBatch and how you might start writing your own.
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Edward Powell is another victim of Sinclair's Spectrum 48K, followed by early debt in order to acquire an Amiga A500. This allowed him to cut his teeth on the Dice C compiler & wireframe rendering and he has been hooked on tinkering with game programming and, in particular 3D rendering techniques, ever since.
Edward is now Development Manager for ArtCAM, a 3D modelling & manufacturing package by Delcam plc.
He will be discussing game architecture, the content pipeline & 3D modelling. |
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Microsoft MVP and founding member of NxtGenUG, Richard Costall is a Silverlight expert who, along with his fellow Spectrum fanatic, Pete McGann, turned his skills to games programming with great effect.
Rich will demonstrate how you can levarage your existing XNA skills to create Viral/Casual Games in Microsoft's RIA (Rich Interactive Applications) platform Silverlight. We'll cover the basics of the Silverlight platform and demonstrate a classic 80's game, built on a shared engine written in XNA! |
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Charles' interest in computers started with the classic Atari console. In 1995 Charles started programming professionally in C and has been developing ever since. He now works for BT Expedite (and soon BT Fresca) as a senior C# developer.
Charles discovered XNA in December 2006 when XNA 1.0 was released on a tutorial site called The Hazy Mind and have been addicted to it ever since. His contribution to the XNA community over this period was recognised by Microsoft in July of this year, when he was awarded an MVP.
His talks will cover UV mapping, including the basics of how to UV map in blender3D, how the model is then exported and used in an XNA project and how to use that map in a shader. |
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Dave Bonner is co-founder (along with Charles Humphrey) of Dark Omen Games, and was the lead developer on Nebulon, an old school arcade style shooter which was released on to the XBLIG service back in July. Nebulon held a top 20 spot in the US charts for several weeks, and was IGN’s #1 pick during August (US Charts).
Dave will be talking about the publishing process that developers must go through in order to get their games released on to the service, as well as the pitfalls to look out for when submitting for testing / peer review, and some strategies for marketing and promoting your own games when running on a tight budget (or no budget! ). |
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John Hampson is a XNA programming hobbyist and game enthusiast. He has been programming for 4 years and has worked on numerous projects. John works for LG Electronics in software testing.
John's current project is on his own XNA title 'Britonia', a 3d first-person RPG. Britonia relies heavily on procedural content generation at run-time to create realistically scaled solar systems with planets and ground geometry.
His talks will cover various methods of procedural content generation. |
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