Book Image

XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide - Visual Basic Edition

By : Kurt Jaegers
Book Image

XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide - Visual Basic Edition

By: Kurt Jaegers

Overview of this book

XNA Game Studio enables hobbyists and independent game developers to easily create video games, and now gives that power to Visual Basic developers. XNA lets you bring your creations to life on Windows, the Xbox 360 and the Windows Phone platforms. The latest release of XNA has added support to Visual Basic and therefore, Visual Basic developers now have the power to give life to their creativity with XNA.This book covers both the concepts and the implementations necessary to get you started on bringing your own creations to life with XNA. It presents four different games, including a puzzler, space shooter, multi-axis shoot 'em up, and a jump-and-run platformer. Each game introduces new concepts and techniques to build a solid foundation for your own ideas and creativity.This book details the creation of four games, all in different styles, from start to finish using Visual Basic and the Microsoft XNA framework. 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 (16 chapters)
XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example – Visual Basic Edition Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
4
Asteroid Belt Assault – Lost in Space
Index

Time for action – installing XNA Game Studio


  1. Visit http://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started, and download the latest version of the Windows Phone SDK package. Run the setup wizard and allow the installation package to complete.

  2. Open Visual Studio 2010 Express. Click on the Help menu and select Register Product. Click on the Register Now link to go to the Visual Studio Express registration page. After you have completed the registration process, return to Visual Studio 2010 Express and enter the registration number into the registration dialog box.

  3. Close Visual Studio 2010 Express.

  4. Launch Visual Studio 2010 Express, and the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) will be displayed, as shown in the following screenshot:

Tip

Other versions of Visual Studio and XNA

Different versions of Visual Studio and XNA can be installed on the same PC, without interfering with each other. If you wish to target the Zune platform, you will need to install Visual Studio 2008 Express and XNA 3.1 (which only supports the C# language). Additionally, Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Professional can co-exist on the same PC, and XNA will integrate with both of them, if the Windows Phone SDK is installed after Visual Studio.

What just happened?

You have now successfully installed the Windows Phone SDK, which includes Visual Studio 2010 Express, the XNA Extensions for Visual Studio, and the re-distributable Font Pack provided by Microsoft for XNA developers.