XNA Game Studio enables hobbyists and independent game developers to easily create video games. It gives you the power to bring your creations to life on Windows, the Xbox 360, the Zune, and the Windows Phone platforms. But before you give life to your creativity with XNA, you need to gain a solid understanding of some game development concepts.

This book covers both the concepts and the implementations necessary to get you started on bringing your own creations to life with XNA. It details the creation of four games, all in different styles, from start to finish using the Microsoft XNA Framework, including a puzzler, space shooter, multi-axis shoot-'em-up, and a jump-and-run platform game. Each game introduces new concepts and techniques to build a solid foundation for your own ideas and creativity.

Beginning with the basics of drawing images to the screen, the book then incrementally introduces sprite animation, particles, sound effects, tile-based maps, and path finding. It then explores combining XNA with Windows Forms to build an interactive map editor, and builds a platform-style game using the editor-generated maps. Finally, the book covers the considerations necessary for deploying your games to the Xbox 360 platform.

By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation of game development concepts and techniques as well as working sample games to extend and innovate upon. You will have the knowledge necessary to create games that you can complete without an army of fellow game developers at your back.

A step-by-step tutorial to using Microsoft XNA by creating four different styles of video games.

What you will learn from this book

• Install the Microsoft XNA Framework and its required tools
• Build XNA Game projects and associated XNA Content projects
• Create a puzzle-style game exploring the concepts of game states, recursion, and 2D animation
• Add sound effects to your game with a "fire-and-forget" sound effects manager
• Create a particle system to generate random explosions
• Implement sound effects, collisions, and particle-based explosions by building a space shooter inside a chaotic asteroid field.
• Implement the A* path-finding algorithm to allow enemies to track down the player
• Generate tile-based maps and path-finding enemy tanks amidst a storm of bullets in a multi-axis shooter
• Combine XNA and Windows Forms to create a map editor for a multi-layered tile map engine
• Run, jump, and squash enemies in a side-scrolling platform using the maps from your editor
• Modify your creations for the Xbox 360 platform and deploy your games to the console

Approach

This book is a step-by-step tutorial that includes complete source code for all of the games covered. It adopts an engaging style to teach all the game development concepts. Each block of code is explained, and game development concepts are diagrammed and covered in detail. Each game begins with a concept description and concludes with suggestions for expanding on the finished game.

Who this book is written for

If you are an aspiring game developer who wants to take a shot at creating games for the Microsoft Windows platform with the XNA Framework, then this book is for you. Using this book, you can get started with creating games without any game development experience. A basic knowledge of C# would be helpful to kick-start your game development, but it's not essential.