A mate of mine is looking to turn a board game he has developed into a game for PC, Xbox and PS3. I can't talk about the game itself but it is something like Risk, you know the world domination strategy game. So it will be set out like Risk was on the Nintendo or something like it, not like other strategy games like Command and Conquer. He has the board game itself all sorted out and balanced properly but the cost of getting it into production is an issue so he decided to try making a PC game out of it instead and would then port it over to consoles. He is also considering making it just for the Xbox360 and selling it through Xbox Live so compilers for the Xbox360 may be all that he needs. He doesn't know any programming except some basic (from c64 days) so is looking for a compiler that can do most/all the hard work. He wants to look at every software option so everything from free to paid software is fine.
what use is a compiler if you can't code for it? Shouldn't first thing be balancing the books, seeing if comfortable with percentage M$ will charge firstly for a dev kit and then for licence to dev for xbox(2 in 1 package i'm sure) and thirdly percentage they'd take per sale. How about a Java applet? Then will run on anything with a browser essentially. But at the end of the day its a BS question cause if you have to ask then you won't be able to do it. Or maybe the compiler is free but dev, marketing and xbox360 platform isn't. Risk style game, on xbox 360 ummmm for free maybe on that or any other platform but I'd prefer the board game. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...AC-29B3-4E6B-A068-8BAC8B334C95&displaylang=en
For XBox 360 and PC you could look at XNA (see http://creators.xna.com/) which is free but you need to pay a fee for games to be published to Xbox Live. You can only use C# (some people have got it working with C++ I believe) to code with but the XNA Framework removes alot the the complexity compared with 'native' XBox development.
