Working on Chime threw up several technical challenges, which I will post about in the coming week. It was an interesting project — my first XBOX 360 Live game. First off, conversion to XBOX 360 Live.

Windows to XBOX 360 Live

Chime was originally developed in Zoë Mode’s Lab. The Lab is a great place to experiment, quickly add new features, and try things out, but the time eventually came to take Chime out of the Lab and into a more regular production environment.

It was developed on Windows using XNA Game Studio, Microsoft’s home-brew package for amateur games developers. Game Studio works on the kind of 360 kits you can find in any games store, but professional games developers use special development kits, which provide a whole raft of extra features to help create a game.

The Lab used XNA because it allowed rapid prototyping on their various projects.

Luckily Microsoft provides a package for Game Studio called XDK Extensions. This made the initial port from Windows to 360 almost effortless. Now we had Chime building for the Xbox 360, but it didn’t work straightaway; an automatic port can only do so much. There are many differences between a PC and a games console such as the way files are handled, how to deal with Xbox Live Arcade, and the controls, which I’ll be talking about in my next post.

- Barry Northern, Lead Programmer.