Buyaa, I'm Microsoft MVP once again in the XNA/DirectX category for one more year (2009/2010). I have been an XNA MVP since 2006 and I'm still very proud of it :)

I was pretty busy this year with our current game project "Fireburst" at exDream (a racing game for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC using the Unreal3 engine, more about it soon) and theirfore I did not do many other things (except writing some iPhone games, starting to develop my own dynamic language and some tools). But once that project is done in 1-2 months, I will do lots more XNA fun stuff and hopefully XNA Community Games (now called Indie Games on the Xbox 360, I really hate that term) will be available in Germany so I can finally review and submit some games myself. I'm still pretty fit in XNA 3.1 and DirectX 11 (played around with it a lot in March), but for XNA I'm still waiting for availablilty in Germany and for DirectX 11 I'm really waiting for some cool hardware at the end of this year.

At exDream we recently also had some interesting discussions about using .NET for PS3 (recently possible thanks to Novell), Xbox 360 (hello XNA) and PC or even more dynamic script languages for upcoming projects. Maybe also including some other promising platforms such as iPhone (also .NET able thanks to Unity), Android, PSP Go, WII, whatever, but that all should depend more on the game and if we are able to manage so many platforms. Working with XNA was almost no extra work to make a game run on the Xbox 360 plus the PC, the game just has to fit and you obviously should allow control with the Xbox 360 controller. Our multiplatform game Fireburst is also not that bad to develop for because most issues are handled by the great Unreal3 engine (except the fact of course that it is all ugly C++ and UnrealScript code, which just looks like C++ anyway and even has to be compiled), but it is still quite a lot more work than just doing a PC only game, especially because of optimizations and testing required for all platforms.

Enough rambling, I'm going to celebrate this day by installing Windows 2008 server (omg) because our pre-release version we had on there just ran out (warg) .. stupid thing has to be completely reinstalled, no upgrade option ..