When they first announced the XNA Game Development Studio as a free tool for people to create games for the PC and Xbox 360, I assumed that it would just be a haven for tinkerers, creating games like you would find on any flash acrhive on the internet. Speaking with the guys from Torpex Games today shattered that assumption completely. Far from game hobbyists, Torpex encompasses at least two of the top talents in the industry. Bill Dugan, the company president, has worked on classic games such as Neuromancer, Wastleland, and Battle Chess, while technical director Jamie Fristrom not only worked on the Magic Candle RPG series back in the day, but also is credited with creating the swing system for Spiderman 2, arguably the best part of the game.

Fristrom had been trying various coding tools to try and come up with a game prototype for their new company, but found that many of the common tools available were too unwieldy or too difficult to allow him to quickly get something up and running. Finally he turned to C#, which is the langauge used in XNA, and within four days had a working prototype built.

These weren't four gamer days either. These were four real person days, which include eating, sleeping, taking a moment to check out what's on TV, etc. Granted, as Dugan pointed out during our meeting, Jamie Fristrom is a stud, but four days to a functional prototype is pretty spectuacular no matter who you are.

Fristrom figured they would have to take the C# code and port it over to something a bit more professional, but that's where XNA came in. With the code already in the correct format, XNA was simply the most logical and cost-effective choice for a small startup development studio finding their stride. While most big devs have to spend upwards of $15,000 or more per person for all the tools needed to create a title, XNA development costs next to nothing in comparison.

Fristrom likes to practice agile development, where instead of mapping out exactly what you want in the game and then implementing, you instead start the implementation and tweak it until it feels right. It's how he arrived at with the perfect swinging system in Spiderman 2, so the results speak for themselves. With XNA they can quickly tweak ideas, behavoirs, etc., meaning that when a revision is needed it came be performed not only quicker, but with less potential code screwup than programming in other languages.

Now Torpex Games is planning to release their new game, Schizoid, via Xbox Live by the end of the year. Overall development has been a mere two months, a fraction of what it might have taken them using more expensive tools. While the XNA team has provided them with special tools to incorporate Xbox Live hooks into the game such as leaderboards and online play, the rest of the game is purely a product of the XNA Studio toolset.

As to what exactly Schizoid is...well that remains a little fuzzy to me. What I saw was a balck backdrop where crafts very reminiscent of the critters from Flow manuevered about, and there were explosions. It looked rather beautiful, and I will be following up with Torpex as more information becomes available.

While I will touch a bit more on the potential of XNA to the development community later in the week, I thought it was quite interesting to see two great industry veterans embracing the technology that up until recently I attributed mainly with homebrew hobbists and weekend coders. Apparently you can teach old dogs new tricks, and Torpex is living proof. Michael Fahey

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