Kyro as a suggestion, you and the devs might want to have a separate section on the forum just for game devolopment discussion.  what i mean is the techncal aspects of it.  I know that Ron Luggae is also doing a CS degree and is interested in doing stuff or working for stardock in a future date probably on the game development side of things.  Also i am sure there are others in the mod community who might want to give constructive contribution to various pc game making discussions from programming to game mechanics design, etc.  I for one would be interested.  I am learning C/C++ on my own and i know that there are Allgeo/Ogre libraries exists for both languagaes which specializes for game making purposes.  Though i am not sure i will do much delving into these libraries besides just for knowing about the graphics rendering and AI aspect of game development.  However, i would not mind reading and learnign about various aspect of game development besides these two. 

There is, actually, it just doesn't appear on the various game site forums (that being the reason I used the more general category).

Cool stuff, Kyro. You going to port this to XNA3 and put it up on the 360 Community games list?

Probably not, since it's just for a class project (and we're using .NET 2.0) for now. Plus doesn't putting stuff up at the creator's club require a pay subscribtion?

Ah, yes.  When I saw XNA I immediatly assumed the 360 was your destination  

But yeah, I think if you sign up for their Dream/Build/Play context you get a free 4 month Creators Club membership...and playing your creation on the console is quite a reward in itself....if you have one, that is

BoogieBac, since we are on the topic of game development; what is the ETA for a playable level of the Christmas Game?  I thought the last few playable parts were pretty cool, and it looked like you had most of it all set up.

Kryo, your asteroid game looks pretty cool.  I can't try it out due to the limitations of using XNA game studio, but I can say it is better than the best space game that I wrote when I was a kid.  (The best one was called 2012, where you were a fighter and shot down incoming fighters with various weapons.  You were fixed in the middle of the screen, with the ability to dodge left or right, and I had around 30 different weapons you could fire by pressing different keys on the keyboard - I spent most of my time making cool looking weapons to fire.  The game was about as basic as they get, but it was fun to make.)  I am assuming that it is just like the game asteroids, or am I mistaken?

Sort of, though here you're fixed at the bottom of the screen (can move left and right) and the asteroids just come down at you from above.

Are you sure that the game can't be compiled to run without XNA studio? I recall several games actually being made with XNA and I was able to play them without having it installed.

Not with 2.0, at least, as far as I can tell. It seems it flat out won't work with the normal publish functions in Visual Studio, and in .ccgame format, it definitely won't work with the small XNA redist. If you've seen anywhere that it does tell of a way though, I'd be glad to hear it.

So, after some digging, I've got it figured out. You still can't build an installer in VS (that just won't work, period), but it seems you can run XNA games in normal built form, provided you have .NET 2.0 SP1 and the XNA redist, and ALL of DX9. Apparently that last one is the sticky point, as the 9.0c redist that most people will have used does NOT install "everything". You have to get the DX web installer and let it download whatever it wants.

Will put up a new post shortly with all this and the game for everyone.