Back to XNA - Programming Considerations

I've got 2 weeks until I start contracting for E.ON so thought I'd get back to playing with XNA. Well, actually that's a lie. I started out this morning on Call of Duty 4, but kept dying on All Ghillied Up so then I decided to start playing with XNA.

I've signed up for the XNA Creators Club and tried launching the Space Wars starter kit project on my Xbox. Took a while to deploy all the content, but then again I am going over a wireless connection. I was impressed though, and started to think about what kind of game I could try to make.

Whatever I choose, I thought, I need to understand how the GamePad class works. So I started with a simple game that just output the state of the pad as a string to the screen. And it's here where I found my first problem. The screen on a television is very different to the monitor I was using for the Windows games I've made previously.

Firstly, the TV's refresh rate is lower than my monitor's so you can see slight flickering when you have a bright screen. Pretty sure that will give me a headache if I look at it too much, so my Xbox games will need a darker background than on PC.

But probably more important is that TV screens can trim off part of the display, so you don't get the full screen to play with. Xbox 360 Programming Considerations explains this, and other things to be aware of when making games.

So I'll give it some thought, and figure out what type of game I want to make.