by Uditha sampath bandara

Ten years back when you heard about Software industry in Sri lanka, that’s the  same feeling that  you get with the game industry in Sri Lanka as of now  .But now  In Sri Lanka we have big software industry with big software companies. Still in Sri Lanka we couldn`t see a game industry. But game industry is one of the world largest industries. According to Jupiter research Game industry is bigger than the movie industry in Hollywood and music industry with over 18 billon dollars revenue only in US.

Also there are popular console are for gaming other than PC games. Like XBOX 360, PS3, Nintendo Wii and PSP. Many of game studios are making games for those consoles. Sometimes one game has different versions for different consoles.

Making their own video game is dream of many gamers. But until now resources to do that was haven’t be in place. So now the technology is enabling you to make your own video games .Technologies like XNA giving you the tools for that.

With XNA you can create games for PC, Xbox 360 and Zune .So now you can create your version of GTA or Need for Speed or Age of empires using these technologies .Using .NET as a platform you can get started with XNA far more easily. Also you can use all the feature of .NET in to your game as well.

 For the graphics you can use software’s like Photoshop, 3ds max, Maya and blender. Then you can do the programming in XNA by using those graphics.

All the game play and algorithms you can program by using XNA. And comparing to other exiting technologies it was much easier to program. Because XNA runs on managed code. Otherwise you need to write code for memory management, graphics processors and other specific hardware’s.

But with XNA it was much easier to develop games without considering those things. Other important thing is it’s a cross platform API .So you can develop same game that runs on PC, Xbox360 and Zune as well. And you can use the Xbox live services in your game. From that you’ll be able to get players gamer tag, achievement and you can define your own Xbox live achievement in your game.

 With the XBOX LIVE Community game platform you can also make money form your XNA game. All you need to do just make a Xbox game with XNA  and publish your game as XNA community game. Then you can set a price for your game using Microsoft points. As an example you can set a price 400 or 800 Microsoft points in your Game. There are more than 14 million Xbox live users. So any Xbox live user can buy your game. Let say two million Xbox live users buy your XNA game .Then you can get about 8 million us dollars. But you can have only 70% of that money. That mean you got more than 5 million dollars in your hand for your XNA game which worth about four dollars.

So whether form a PC game or Xbox game we can make money for our game and I hope that enables to grow game industry in Sri Lanka in the future.

                                       Xbox 360 logo                                               XNA logo

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