With Dream Build Play and the Community Game beta wrapping up its time to take stock of your games and decide what you could have done better ready for the final Community Games release whenever that is. Having a post Mortem is a gret way to look at what to do differently next time.

Gamasutra has just published such a post mortem of Schizoid - the first (and currently only) XNA based game on XBox Live Arcade. Its worth a read, XNA Game Studio makes it into the bad and the good and the note about TCRs should make all of you wondering about community game realise how easy you are going to have it.

This are a couple of particularly damning especially from a team who praised the ease of prototyping and ease of C# over C++ - Jamie actually said something like 'I hope I never have to go back to C++ at gamefest 2007'

A lot of times the natural expressions you'd want to use when programming in C# will cause unseemly hitches when garbage collects on the 360, and you're probably going to want to multithread what would, if you had written in C++ in the first place, probably run fine entirely on one core.

The end result is the time you save prototyping and getting up-and-running in the first place can be lost in working around performance later.

Hopefully those comments will raise the GC and other perf issues on the XNA teams agenda for future releases... of course few of us will ever tax things as much as Schizoid but the joy of c# for me has always been that I dont have to worry about things like memory too much because the GC is so damn good at sorting things out... on the Xbox that's just not true

Of course there is still some praise

If it wasn't for XNA Game Studio making it so easy to get a prototype up-and-running and in front of people, Schizoid would never have happened.

XNA Game Studio was so easy to use that we didn't have to write a single tool to make the game