Rob Miles has been producing XNA screencasts for a while now for Thirteen 1 magazine. In fact he has now finished the first set. If you want to take a lok at these. along with the lab content, you can find them here:
http://verysillygames.com/Screencasts
If you want to hear Rob’s dulcet tones telling you all about getting started with C# and XNA then this is the place to go.
Rob Miles has now made the Famous Yellow Book available for download from his blog. This is the book that is used at the University of Hull to teach C# to the first year. It is given to students (and Open Day visitors) in printed form, but you can now get a PDF version for free.
Rob Miles in the Very Silly Team is presently working on some curriculum materials so that anyone teaching programming can use XNA, C# and a bit of silliness to get the message across. The content is presently in production but will be available for limited review in a few weeks. It will be based on the book and will take the form of Powerpoint presentations and some structured practical work to go alongside.
We are starting a mailing list for anyone who wants to register an interest in the content to keep you informed of progress (note that this will be strictly used for this purpose and no other).
If you want to be kept informed of curriculum developments, send an email to curriculum@verysillygames.com and we will add you to the list.
I've set up another area of the site. The Silly Surgery provides a place where you can drop broken programs for a crack team of software surgeons to take a look and get back to you.
The kind of problems that we are looking to solve are the ones that begnining programmers have when trying to learn to create code. Not ones with multi-threaded synchronisation across processor cores when trying to perform rendering using direct shader code injection (whatever that means).
We are not promising to fix everything, but we can try.
Whilst I was at GDC I picked up a free Creators Club membership at the XNA sessions. I think it is for four months, but you may be lucky. Anyhoo, I'll give it to the the person who comes up with the silliest game idea in the next couple of days. My decision is final (I consider myself an expert in silliness).
Remember that if you are a student on a course of study you can get a Creators Club membership for free via DreamSpark, but for anyone else out there, this might save a bit of cash. Put your idea as a comment on this post.
Not content with providing mugs and T shirts, the Very Silly Game franchise is now moving into game developer resources. Every now and the we will be posting items that you might want to include in your games.
Today you can download the only sound effect you will ever need. Created by accident in the Very Silly Games labs, this sound can be used for any purpose, from a stylish ring tone to game over, and just about everything in between. Simply grab the bit that you want from this symphony of sound...
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
