Saturday, February 28, 2009

Another Update, and more Reviews

Zoomaroom has been updated again to fix some issue people have had with saving rooms, and to add a much-requested feature: You can now delete rooms you have created or rooms you have downloaded from others! Just load the room in the editor, press start, and go to "Delete Room".

Again, in order to get the update you will have to download the game from Xbox Live Marketplace again (you will not be charged if you already bought it). Unfortunately, Community Games do not get auto-updates like Arcade or retail games do on the Xbox 360.

Also, more reviews have come in for Zoomaroom, here's a couple of them from IGN and GayGamer.net:

http://xboxlive.ign.com/articles/957/957993p1.html

http://gaygamer.net/2009/02/xbox_live_community_watch_2202.html

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Another positive review of Zoomaroom

Uhfgood just posted his review of Zoomaroom on his site.

Check it out:
http://reviews.gamesafoot.com/?p=132

Zoomaroom Reviews

Zoomaroom has been out for just under a week, and we're already starting to see some reviews come in.

This site has some user reviews for Zoomaroom (and many other Community Games):

http://www.xblaratings.com/component/content/article/62-platformer/554-Zoomaroom

Below, I've embedded a review from XNA Roundup:




I recommend subscribing to XNA Roundup through YouTube or iTunes, they are great way of finding the best of the Community Games amongst the flood of games that has hit the service recently (episodes 1-6 are worth watching as well).

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Zoomaroom Updated

We just released an update to Zoomaroom that includes two bug fixes.
1) some people saw a code 4 after the title screen due to a race condition.
2) some people could not connect to a lobby when the first connection fails

If you downloaded the game before this update you'll need to re-download it to get the update.

If you try to join a lobby, and it says 'Version out of Date', that means you need to re-download Zoomaroom to get the update.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Bugs

If you find any Zoomaroom bugs, please post them with repro steps in the comments. We'd like to fix anything that comes up quickly, so your help could really make the difference.

EDIT: We now have a forum on xbox.com, which is a great place to post bugs, issues, or suggestions.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Zoomaroom is available NOW!

Queue it up to download to your Xbox 360 by going here:

Zoomaroom on Xbox Live Marketplace

Zoomaroom is officially available on Xbox360 in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain!

The trial is free to download and play, and the full version is 200 MS points ($2.50 USD).

Each of us at FourBrosStudios have achieved some excellent best times in many of the rooms and built some pretty cool custom levels not included in the game. If you see us in an online lobby our known best time data will synchronize and you'll have the opportunity to download our rooms (or anyone elses, if you see them in a lobby). Just press Y while you're playing to join a lobby.

Hope to see you online!

So close to shipping

We've passed peer review and are now waiting to hit XBL.

I'll post a link to the xbox.com page once it goes live.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Zoomaroom is in Peer Review!

Zoomaroom is now in the final stage before appearing on Xbox Live Marketplace. Once enough people from the XNA Creator's Club community review and approve the game, it will be published onto the Community Games channel of Xbox Live Marketplace.

We also have an official trailer to go along with the release of Zoomaroom:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:bc27bcd6-b877-4ec0-ab28-f6313c6b90b5&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Zoomaroom Trailer">Video: Zoomaroom Trailer</a>

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Zoomaroom is now in PlayTest!

One of the optional stages of submission to Xbox Live Community Games is the PlayTest stage. In this stage we can release a "release candidate" build and get feedback and opinions from other Creator's Club members.

We can then roll up that feedback, act on some of it, ignore some of it, and submit a final release for Peer Review.

Peer Review is different from PlayTesting in that a Peer Reviewer is simply checking for the appropriateness of the game's content, crashes, hangs, and other major issues like that. PlayTesting is a way to get feedback about whether your game is too hard, not fun, missing a key feature, or really anything!

For those of you who are Creator's Club members, head over to:

http://catalog.xna.com/en-US/GameDetails.aspx?catalogEntryId=f54d9016-3058-4d54-998b-be65f5bc03bd&type=1

and try out our game! Leave us feedback on our game's PlayTest forum:

http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/25142.aspx

For everyone else, we expect to have the game released soon after PlayTesting finishes up. At that point, any Xbox Live member will be able to download and play the game from their Xbox 360. The trial will be free, and the full version will be 200 MS Points ($2.50 US).

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Zoomaroom Progress

The videos in the previous post are from more than two weeks ago. We've come a long way since then, adding polish, fixing bugs, tweaking features, and finalizing the level line up.

In the next few days, we will be submitting the game for Play Test so that other XNA Creator's Club members can try the game out and give us feedback before we submit to the broader Xbox Live community.

If you are a Creator's Club member, feel free to contact us about play testing the game over the next week or so: zoomaroom@live.com