   Newbie questions...
  Hi all, I'm new here.I'm entirely new to game development, though not to programming (been working in Java and some database stuff for some years).Which platform is most newbie-friendly? I am mainly curious about whether or not it would be a reasonable project for someone in my position to try and write for the Xbox-360-Live Indie-Game platform. Is that recommendable, or should I stick to stuff for the PC?   
  The XNA creators club makes it amazingly easy to write games for the Xbox 360. Particularly if you're already familiar with programming in general (and Java experience will help you get started with C#/XNA I'd imagine).I suggest you just dive straight in. You can download XNA Game Studio for free and get started on the PC straight away. It's quite easy to transfer a game you've developed on the PC in XNA to the Xbox later (you'll need to pay the $100 membership fee to be able to deploy games to your Xbox, so it's probably better to just start off on the PC)   