Site is live.  What started as just the search for an informal name to encompass information about the little game I was making turned into a bit of a side project in itself, and ultimately resulted in this website - Funplosion Labs.  In strictly practical terms, this site is way overkill for a game that is still really just a crude prototype with a bunch of bad programmer art and a long ways from release.  However, in the larger context of "learning stuff" I think it was time well spent and an entertaining tangent.

So, welcome! There's not a whole lot here yet but there are a couple articles I would like to highlight:  

Finding Free assets (funplosion.com/free) :: One of the things I was frustrated by intitially was the amount of work it took to find free stuff like graphics to use in your game.  It wasn't so much the lack of free content, as it was the overwhelming abundance of mis-labelled "free" content.  Ripping graphics from Final Fantasy XX and putting them on your website does not make them free!  And there are a loooot of websites like that out there.  So, sifting through long lists of web site links, many sites long gone, much of the content either blatantly not legal or free but only for non-commercial use... the exploration process took much longer than I expected.  Hopefully this article will save others some of that legwork.

XNA Developer Toolbox (funplosion.com/toolbox) :: C# and XNA Game Studio are obvious, but beyond that tools are needed to cover other areas of game development such as graphics and audio manipulation.  This article highlights the tools I have found very useful and has links to some good tutorials for getting up to speed quickly.

With this site I hope to streamline things for others and strive to provide some quality content that is relevant to aspiring XNA developers like myself, or other indie game creators.  I figure I'm already putting in the time to sift through assets, tutorials, looking for the right application to fill different needs, etc in order to fuel my own learning process... I might as well throw the info up online where hopefully it can benefit others as well.

That's "Funplosion Labs" in a nutshell.  One day it will hopefully contain some info about my own little game, but for now it will just continue to echo my own learning process and hopefully accumulate some quality content over time.  I hope you find it useful.

If there's anything you find particularly helpful (or not) or anything you'd like to see more of, let me know.  

Cheers,  

  Xuro