I see hundreds of developers these days using the 'Indie' label and personally I feel they're creating confusion by grouping themselves with much more established studios with much higher production values. It's something I've been wanting to comment on for a while and here I'll state my personal opinion and I ask those reading to comment if you agree or disagree with what I have to say.

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I've not posted much lately as I've been busy finishing my game Positron but I've been seeing increasingly negative comments targetted at Microsoft with regards to Windows 8, XNA, and XBLIG lately and I thought I'd post something to share my thoughts.

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Being an advocate of the Xbox Live Indie Games channel I have always tried to stay on top of the games being released and follow many of the developers on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

The thing is, there are many more XBLIG developers who I'm not following, and many games which get very little exposure on the internet and they don't get the coverage from the gaming media either.

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I was pleased to see an article about Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) on gamesindustry.biz this week, but after reading it I think the writer still did not really explain what the article title hinted at. The article in question subtitled 'How To Survive' does not really give much insight into how the platform and the marketplace works for the average developer. It showcases some of the work done by some of the more experienced developers and sweeps away the thousands of failed ventures that have gone before them.

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I've just submitted this issue on Connect (Microsoft's 'Bug tracker'), if you're an XNA developer interested in developing for XBLIG please read and 'vote-up' my issue (note you'll need to log in to a Live! account first):

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Yesterday I launched my new review website IndieTrials.com. The website was set up to review the games released on Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) but specifically reviews the trial experience offered by the game.

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I've been using a third party physics library in my XNA projects since mid 2010 called BEPUphysics . When I started using BEPUphysics it was distributed under a commercial license which meant you had to pay a percentage of your game's revenue to the creators of BEPUphysics.

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I've been thinking for a while that I need to go back to my XNA BSP Processor / Importer to optimize the output a little more and my current focus is optimizing the patch meshes in the BSP. We use NetRadiant to create our game levels in BSP format (and for our track builder I export each piece as an individual BSP then convert it into a mesh since I'm not really a modeller but I'm pretty good with level editing tools).

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Here's a preview of my latest XNA project, a new track builder game for Xbox Live Indie Games. The screenshot here shows a view of the track in free-view mode after creating the track in-game. The aim of the game is to create your own tracks, set fastest lap times and share them with other people on Xbox Live!

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