Rise Up, Gaming...

Well, I hope you have been enjoying some of these Xbox Indie Uprising Releases as much as I have. We are about halfway through it and I think the best of them are still yet to come. I'm particularly looking forward to Alpha Squad myself.

To me it's not so much the games, but the ideas behind the games, and the process that must have occurred for these games to appear on our 360 Dashboard. A space for independent developers on a consumer games console with limited oversight from the console manufacturer on what shall and shall not appear in that space, That kind of thing just doesn't happen overnight. The Indie Channel spent a good portion of time as a beta on the web and then a beta on the dashboard before it was ready for primetime as they say. And here we are two years later with nearly 1500 games on the service. Some are great, some are not, and some should probably be sent back to the drawing board.

I'd like to draw your attention to Microsoft Connect. It's a website where users of MS products can easily submit feedback and log bugs concerning Microsoft Products. There is a page on this site dedicated to all things indie games and there are a number of suggestions listed currently which you can vote and comment on. Here is just a sample of them,

Create an "Indie Game Winter Uprising" list under the XBLIG dashboard

Optional Free Playtesting Membership

XBLIG Leaderboard/Highscore Access

XBLIG Achievement Access 

To access these issues and vote on them just click on the link below,

http://connect.microsoft.com/directory/accepting-bugs/developer-tools/

And scroll down a bit, looking for the XNA Game Studio line, there should be a sign in link on the far right. Sign in with your Windows Live ID and you can start voting on issues that affect XBLIG Development, Distribution, and Our Indie Game presence on the 360 Dashboard among other things. Vote Early, Vote Often and leave lots of comments. Come on now, who doesn't like leaving comments??