I went through the setup process for Xbox independent game development today, which went surprisingly smoothly for something completely unfamiliar to me. You have to set your account up with an App Hub membership, download an application that links your computer to your Xbox over the network, type in the key that it gives you on your PC, and... really, that's it - overall it's about a million times less complicated than the equivalent Kafkaesque profiling/provisioning iOS procedure, and there's something very backwards about this considering the two companies' respective reputations.

But most importantly - Special Agent runs on the Xbox! Once again I'm amazed at how quickly I was able to get something running with Clickteam's exporter. I went through the game I'd written six years ago - a horrifying experience, as any programmer will be able to tell you - ripped out the keyboard controls and replaced them with some Xbox controller actions, "compiled" it (what's the term for when a procedure takes source code and produces different source code?) and only had to change a couple of fonts the Xbox didn't support before I saw the "Building..." indicator change to "Deploying...". With no further complaints, it eventually indicated that it was running the project in debug mode.

I could definitely streamline my testing and deployment process a little, because the Xbox in the bedroom is up two flights of stairs from the PC, building in a period of anticipation as I made my way up for the first time. I really couldn't believe it when I saw the television was displaying the Special Agent title screen, and was amazed by how far I could play into the game's first level before I eventually encountered a crash due to some use of multiple movements on the same object.

As for problems, the frame rate doesn't seem quite as smooth as I'd expect from the Xbox, but the game definitely runs acceptably and it's possible that running at 50fps on NTSC has something to do with it - I'm not sure if the game's given frame rate makes a difference in the XNA runtime. Otherwise, I really was very surprised by how little I had to do before I had something workable, and by working with them to fix the remaining problems, I should be able to polish and release something really very rapidly!