Book Image

XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide

By : Kurt Jaegers
Book Image

XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide

By: Kurt Jaegers

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
4
Asteroid Belt Assault – Lost in Space
Index

Summary


Chapter 4 has us well on our way to implementing a playable version of Asteroid Belt Assault. We have covered:

  • Building a generic Sprite class to represent objects within the game world

  • Creating a scrolling star field using a large number of sprites that update their own positions and a class to encapsulate the management of the star field as a whole

  • Implementing an asteroid field, with asteroids that rebound off each other using elastic collisions to simulate realistic changes in direction and speed

  • Creating manager classes for shots, the player's star fighter, and enemy ships

  • Designing an Enemy class that can follow a set of waypoints as the ships traverse the screen

  • Building an EnemyManager that controls enemy spawn rates and establishes waypoint paths for enemies to follow, as well as controlling enemy fire at the player

In the next chapter, we will finish building the Asteroid Belt Assault game by adding a collision detection system, particle effects, sound effects, and more.