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

About the Reviewers

Rodolfo Rigo Calabrezi has worked in desktop publishing and web advertising campaigns, PC and mobile applications, critical systems and web 2.0 frontend. In the 90s, he made games for the MSX and TRS-Color platforms. In 2004, he worked as the CTO at Eleven Cells, a game development studio. He built an impressive professional network. He was a member of IGDA, working directly on programming, game design, art production, and QA. He teaches and gives lectures in schools about game development. He is in charge of Quantix Games, a Brazilian game development studio. He knows PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C/C++, C#, HLSL, engine architecture, graphics pipeline, ODE, Ageia, Direct3D, OpenGL, Jupiter, Cipher, PopCap, HGE, XNA, and Flash and is learning UDK and Unity. For DCC, he works with Photoshop, Flash, modo, Reason, and Nuendo, and is learning XSI and Maya. He is familiar with the following platforms—PC, PocketPC, Amiga, Xbox 360, and PS2, and is new to iPhone and iPad.

He is interested in development for other console platforms like PS3, Nintendo Wii, and DS.

Dustin Heffron is an avid gamer and programmer. He graduated in 2010 from Penn State University with a Bachelor's of Science degree in Computer Science. He has had 7+ years of experience programming in various languages and environments, including all C-based languages and most .NET languages. He has worked with XNA since 2007 and applied it in a variety of military and video game related projects.

Currently, Dustin works for the Applied Research Lab at Penn State as a Graphical User Interface programmer and Acid Lab Studios as Lead Programmer. He is planning on releasing his first episodic commercial game, "The Scarab Gauntlet" in late 2010, with additional episodes to follow.

Alexandre Ribeiro de Sá is a Producer, Director, Programmer and self-proclaimed frustrated artist. Alexandre was present in many game development community websites in Brazil giving support in translation and writing articles about software development and CG. Today as a producer, programmer, and sometimes as a game designer in his own game studio, the Vortex Game Studios in São Paulo, Brazil, he works with outsourcing and in his own games titles for computer and video game consoles.