The Rules of the Beta

Before we start, let’s get the fine print out of the way. The beta for community game sharing is just that, a beta. Please be patient with us as we work out the kinks in the system. It is a great way for you to get your games ready for prime time.

Please remember one thing: you must resubmit your games at the end of the beta when we open up community games to all Xbox LIVE users. The beta provides an opportunity for you to tell us what worked, what didn’t work, and what needs improvement. Because this is a beta, there will be a few limitations. Each limitation is called out explicitly with a beta note in this article. Here are some basic facts about the beta:

• The beta is limited to XNA Creators Club premium members. Only premium members can submit, peer review, download, and play games.

• Only distributing games in the United States region will be supported.

• Games submitted in the beta will be taken down at the end of the beta. You will need to resubmit and get your game reviewed again when we launch community games to the public.

• Have fun -- as a creator, you’ll have a chance to influence the submission and review systems. Give us your feedback. We will listen.

• Be patient -- did I mention that this is a beta?

Enough fine print... let's get started!

Building your game

The first step is to build your game. Make sure you create an Xbox 360 project because you are submitting your game to run on an Xbox 360, not Windows. The submission system accepts only files in the .ccgame format. For that, you must use the XnaPack utility. You can find instructions on how to package your game here: sharing your game package. You need to provide a thumbnail for your game. This thumbnail shows up as the icon next to your game both in the games catalog on XNA Creators Club Web site and in Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Remember that this thumbnail should be acceptable for all ages and be a 64 × 64 .png file. The size of your game package must not exceed 150 MB.

Submitting your game

The entry point into the submission pipeline will be the XNA Creators Club Web site: http://creators.xna.com. In addition to the new look and feel of the site, you’ll notice an entirely new Games section. This is where the magic will happen.

Create a Project

The first step in game submission is to create a project for that game. Just as a solution in XNA Game Studio encompasses multiple releases (for example, debug and retail), a project in our system may encompass releases for multiple regions or multiple platforms.

For the beta, we support only the United States region and only the Xbox 360 platform. However, you could have a project with multiple releases in the Holiday 2008 release. Think of the project as the logical container for related releases.

You can add a project by clicking Add Project from the games catalog. When you create a project, you’ll need to pick a title and genre, and add a description. You will also see a rollup of all the releases you have in that project, with rollup values for each project. We’ll talk about each of these states throughout this article when we talk about releases.