If you answers "yes" to all of the above questions and you own an Xbox 360, then XNA should be the first word in your vocabulary.

About 3 weeks ago I went to a small Microsoft event called XNA Pizza Night with my friend Jota (check his view on this, on his blog). In this event, six teams of game developers showed their experiments with XNA and some of them ended up winning Xbox 360 packages and a few games.

It was the first of many initiatives (I hope) to show XNA and invite all the developers to give it try. XNA stands for XNA is Not an Acronym and is all about technology, services, resources and community, all in favor of building games for Windows and Xbox 360 platforms.

Everything you need to start building games using XNA is free:

• Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition (with SP1)
• XNA Game Studio 2.0

There is already a CTP available for XNA Game Studio 3.0, which runs on Visual Studio 2008, but because it’s not a final version yet, it doesn’t allow you to deploy your games to the Xbox 360. It does, however, allow you to build games for the Zune 🙂

With this software, you can start building your own games, wether they’re as simples as Pong or as complex as Gears of War. Start by browsing some of these sites:

• XNA Creators Club
• XNA Developer Center
• XNA Tutorial

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