I have recently spent two nights doing the most boring, soul crushing, coding since I started messing around with XNA.

The reason for these frustrating evenings is that they were not spent improving gameplay, and were instead fixing edge cases of interface use that most players would not experience.

A little background here, in case people are unaware. Before they will allow you to release your full price console game all console manufacturers have a checklist of requirements that they test your title against. These are generally to ensure a minimum level of quality and standardisation across titles (for example, that games use A as the select button in Xbox menu screens).

(As a side note here there is obviously some argument to be made for the effectiveness of these checks as some modern games are being released with game-ending bugs, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

Similarly, there is a list of around fourteen basic tests that a title must pass before it is allowed to be released on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel.

These checks are for things like allowing a player to use any connected controller, handling the player signing profiles out mid-game, handling memory units being removed, not doing odd things if a guitar controller is connected, etc.

Every game on XBLIG is also required to give an eight minute trial mode.

Now for me, this is where the crux of the problem lies – I feel that the Indie Games channel is being forced towards matching the Xbox Live Arcade too closely and has hit an odd state of attempted commercialisation.

For example in my game, ColorZap, an average play session will last somewhere around the four minute mark. There is no particular draw to the game other than the challenge of beating your previous high score against a rapidly increasing difficulty. This is how the game is designed to be – an incredibly simple score challenge.

The only restriction that fits a trial mode for this game is to disable the saving of the high score table. To cut anything else would give a false impression of the game’s difficulty.

But I did not get into XNA in order to make money. I want to put my game on the XBLIG channel to give it a wider audience than it will receive by being released on this blog (mainly because if I release the Xbox version here only people with premium XNA Creator accounts will be able to deploy it to their Xbox, and the PC version requires the installation of an extra XNA redistributable).

I want to release it for free, and “as is”, with the understanding that it won’t kill your system, but at the same time doing anything particularly untoward may cause very unusual side effects.

There is the argument that I could just price the game at the lowest available value of 80 Microsoft points (roughly a dollar in the US, or 68 pence in the UK) if I am not out for the dirty cash and just want wider distribution. And this is true.

But this brings up two issues to me: firstly, if I am spending money on a title I would expect it to meet certain requirements of not breaking, and also if I am pricing my game at an impulse price, I don’t particularly want to have to spend time on a trial mode.

Is it impulse buy or isn’t it? Surely an impulse does not require an eight minute trial run first? There are many impulse buy games on Apple’s App Store that give no trials, and also plenty of free full games. I don’t see that service being killed by this freedom of choice for the developers.

So that is it – as I want my game to be playable on my friends’ Xboxes I am forced to spend time working on the non-gameplay parts of the game.

I am forced to provide a free trial mode, however little sense that makes in the game’s design. And I am forced to not give the game away for free, even though I want to.

That doesn’t seem very Indie to me.