Microsoft's ID@XBox program has already attracted some pleasantly original projects, from the likes of White Night - key inspirations: Jazz, German expressionism, Alone in the Dark - to There Came An Echo, in which you boss Wesley Crusher around using Kinect. There's always room for more. "Surprise us," was the message delivered by the Xbox Advanced Technology Group's Martin Fuller at the Develop conference earlier this month.

Speaking during a platform access presentation, Fuller called on indies to use the console's features as a springboard for new types of game. Among other avenues, he suggested making more extensive use of Xbox Live analytics to help players track each other's movements from the dashboard - a snappable auxiliary map app, for instance, that allows you to see where a player is in Call of Duty without actually joining the match.

Fuller also posited that developers could use SmartGlass to turn a phone into a motion-sensitive wand, perhaps in order to steer a plane using accelerometers and tilt sensors. Or how about this idea for remote processing? "Imagine if you had a terrain system where the terrain eroded, and you had millions of years of erosion that had to happen in five minutes." This would be doable via the Xbox Live cloud, Fuller went on, because "you don't need the result straight away, it doesn't matter if it doesn't happen for a few seconds, or even a few minutes."

"There's a lot of space for innovation," he concluded. "We really want to see what you can do with our platform." Interested parties might also want to consider cloud gaming boss Robert Fraser's presentation - he discussed how flexible Microsoft Azure server support allows "ultra-MMO" Age of Ascent to field a theoretical 100,000 players per session.



Posted: Jul 21, 2014 8:06 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: http://www.totalxbox.com/79579/microsoft-to-xbox-one-developers-surprise-us/