What is XNA?

environment

XNA Game Studio

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About XNA

XNA is a comprehensive development environment for game development provided by Microsoft. XNA is designed to enable game development for multiple platforms, including Windows, Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Zune. Being able to develop a game that can run on the Xbox 360, a console console, in a development environment that is especially available to the general public, is a very innovative event that has never been done before.

Game placement screen on Xbox 360 (left) Running with Windows Phone Emulator (right)

XNA is available for free as long as you have a Windows PC and an Internet connection. Development is basically done on Windows, and each device you want to run as an execution environment is required.

The cost of the actual device for each development and execution destination is mandatory, but in addition, the premium membership for developing on Xbox 360 is "\9,800 (tax included) / year (as of September 2010)" (when making a game for Xbox 360), and in the case of Windows Phone, development is free, but it costs money to register the software you made. However, since there is a market where you can distribute games made with both Xbox 360 and Windows Phone, you can also sell games and earn income.

• Xbox 360 250GB
• Xbox 360 4GB

* Xbox 360 uses an actual console that can be played as a normal game console.

In addition, compared to DirectX (Unmanaged C++) and Managed DirectX, which have been used for game development such as Windows and Xbox, the XNA Framework has many libraries specialized for games, and eliminates complicated initialization processes and troublesome memory management as much as possible. It is designed to work with simple programs. Currently, "C#" is adopted as the programming language, and both the XNA Framework and C# make good use of each other's advantages, making it very easy to put together programs.

In addition, the XNA Creators Club Online has starter kits, sample programs, and forums to help developers who are new to XNA or have some experience with XNA.

XNA Creators Club Online

Some of the starter kits that are distributed

Below is the official site for XNA. I think you can read more about XNA here.

Official Site

A Brief History of XNA