How to Make Xbox360 Games

Design a game concept. Write a story line for your game. Decide what the title of your game will be. If it's a simple arcade style game at least decide what the objective of the game is. Organizing your ideas on paper will make the actual creation of the game flow much more smoothly and keep you from having to go back and make lots of changes later.

Create concept art. Take your ideas to an artist, or if you are artistically talented, create your own concept art. Concept art is art that serves as a reference when creating visual elements in the. Concept art may also be utilized for cover art or for promotional purposes. You can find tons of artists on deviantart.com. There is a link for deviant art in the Resources section. Review their work and find someone whose art style would complement your concept. Write a proposal message telling what kind of art you would like and what you are willing to pay. Once you have the art, you have the basic scenario, storyline, objective and the visual aspects of your game, it's time for the real work to begin.

Program the game. Besides just writing code, you will also create music and sound effects, and play test the final product repeatedly to find glitches. Unless you're a computer genius, your game is simple, or have unlimited time to develop the game you will need help. You could form a company and hire staff or just outsource some of the work. You can find freelance programmers on sites such as elance.com. There is a link for elance in the Resources section. At this stage you should also have in mind the format for the game. In other words, will it be an xbox live title or available on a disk?

Copyright your finished game. Unless you are going to self-publish, it's important to do this well before you launch your title to protect your idea before you start showing it to publishers.

Get your game published. You will have options. Self-publish through xbox live, find a publishing company to publish your game, or create your own in-house publishing company. Publishing companies will pay to produce disks and usually cover most of the marketing expenses. In exchange, they will take a portion of the profits. If you are looking for a publisher and this is your first title, chances are you will have to work with smaller companies. Don't be discouraged; large companies like Electronic Arts own dozens of software companies, and thus don't often publish games from independent companies or lone programmers. Self publishing is as simple as paying the annual fee at App Hub and submitting your game. App Hub is a website created to provide tools and support to indie game developers. There is a link in the Resources section.