Penny Arcade Announces Scholarship!

[Annette]

The guys at Penny Arcade are right up there with Brad Wardell on our list of most-admired people in this industry. They've recently announced the Penny Arcade Scholarship.

Gabe posted earlier this week:

Essentially if you want to go to college with the goal of eventually ending up in the game industry, well we want to help. Starting in 2007 we’ll cut one person a year a check for $10,000 in order to help them realize their dream of working in the game industry. As Penny Arcade has grown over the years we’ve always tried to remember the words of old Uncle Ben. “With great power comes great responsibility”. We have the greatest jobs in the world and we only have them because of the video game community. We feel a huge responsibility to give back as much and as often as we can.

They say they'll be posting the details and a downloadable application soon. Very cool!

[Combat Wombat]

w00t now if only I wasn't going to school for computer and network security

[Ed Kolis]

Hmm, I was going to post a thread about XNA Game Studio Express (http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/gse/), seeing as it's really cool, but I guess here would be as good a place as any to mention it!
I started working on my own SE4 scrolling shooter last night with it - I must say it takes a lot of the tedium out of DirectX game programming! Sure, you have to use C#, and you need a bunch of prerequisite software like the August DirectX SDK and Visual C# Express, but it is really cool - no more worrying about "why won't that thing render, oh, I passed the wrong Presentation Parameters to the graphics device" for half an hour! Everything is laid out logically - you have a GameComponent class which can be subclassed for pretty much everything in your game (I am using 3 instances of it to render three scrolling starfields of different brightnesses and speeds, which is all my "game" does so far ); there is a clearly defined object oriented game loop in the template project (just code your GameComponents, drop them in the Game class, and the template code will deal with timers and rendering to screen and window resizing and all that messy stuff) - all you have to worry about is your game logic! Granted it's still in beta so some functionality is missing (such as the 3D mesh loader), but if this beta is any indication I think XNA will be a great entry-level game development platform... oh, and did I mention future versions will allow you to code for the Xbox 360?