Furtado
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XNA Challenge: Abdux
Andre Furtado isn't an artist, as he's quick to tell me when showing off the somewhat simple drawings and animations of his XNA Challenge entry Abdux. But while visual art might not be his specialty, Furtado's work shows a certain artistry in the simple, natural input it uses.Furtado first made his mark on the XNA development world with a speech recognition modification to the platform's built-in Space War game. The mod used simple spoken commands like "move" and "fire" to control a pair of helper ships and won Furtado a Brazilian XNA competition. He hasn't gotten similar speech commands into his new alien abduction game yet, but he says he plans to let people create plagues like earthquakes with just the sound of their voice. "Perhaps in the future we will be made fun of for using keyboards and mice and gamepads to control games," he tells me.Furtado isn't in the competition for personal glory, but for experience and knowledge that he can take back to his fellow students in Brazil. "With technology like XNA, students and organizations can easily build a roadmap to game development without much knowledge of programming," Furtado said. Check out some early video of his latest creation after the jump.
