Book Image

Building your First Mobile Game using XNA 4.0

By : Brecht Kets, Thomas Goussaert
Book Image

Building your First Mobile Game using XNA 4.0

By: Brecht Kets, Thomas Goussaert

Overview of this book

With the dawn of the Windows Phone 7 platform, Microsoft has offered us an easy way to create 3D mobile games. In this book, we will build a 3D game for Windows Phone 7 together, taking full advantage of the graphics and touch capabilities, along with the sensors of the platform."Building your First Mobile Game using XNA 4.0" is the book for starting game development on the Windows Phone 7 platform. This book will go over the technical aspects of building games along with designing your own framework. Finally we'll build an actual game together from the ground up! This book will set future mobile game developers in the right direction.The XNA framework empowers us to build 2D and 3D games for PC, Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7. We will use those capabilities to create stunning 3D games for the Windows Phone 7 platform. We will start by covering the basics like drawing graphics, followed by building a custom framework and end with building a game together!In this book, we will cover drawing 2D and 3D graphics, both static and animations. We will also cover the various ways of handling user input and help set the mood of our game playing both 2D and 3D sound, and accessing the user's media library. The only thing left before building a game is covering several techniques created for making our life easier while building the game, whilst building a framework to do just that. Finally, we'll build a 3D game together that will run on the Windows Phone 7 platform."Building your First Mobile Game using XNA 4.0" is the book you need to get started with mobile game development for Windows Phone 7. Its hands on approach will set you on your way in no time. Let's build some games!
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Game concept


Before we can start building a game, we need a game concept. It's very important that you know what you want to create before even writing one line of code. Let's have a look at our game concept. Our game is about a running vampire who can slide, jump, or deflect projectiles by lifting his shield up. These actions are useless if they have no purpose. So we will add some obstacles, this way our hero can use his actions to get around these obstacles.

The game will contain three mechanics to keep things fun and interesting:

  • Our hero runs from the left-hand side to the right-hand side, avoiding obstacles using his actions:

    • Sliding under a swinging iron ball

    • Jumping over rusty spikes

    • Raising the shield to deflect falling rocks

  • Each action will be represented by a button on the Head-up display (HUD), but they will swap places after being pressed. This way it's more challenging to select the appropriate action.

  • We will increase the game speed each time we pass a certain amount of obstacles...