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

Time for action – coding Update() for SquareChase


  1. Add the following to Update() right before the call to base.Update(gameTime);

    if (timeRemaining == 0.0f)
    {
        currentSquare = new Rectangle(
            rand.Next(0, this.Window.ClientBounds.Width - 25),
            rand.Next(0, this.Window.ClientBounds.Height - 25),
            25, 25);
        timeRemaining = TimePerSquare;
    }
    
    MouseState mouse = Mouse.GetState();
    
    if ((mouse.LeftButton == ButtonState.Pressed) &&
      (currentSquare.Contains(mouse.X, mouse.Y)))
    {
        playerScore++;
        timeRemaining = 0.0f;
    }
    timeRemaining = MathHelper.Max(0, timeRemaining - 
        (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds);
    
    this.Window.Title = "Score : " + playerScore.ToString();
    
    

What just happened?

The first thing the Update() routine does is check to see if the current square has expired by checking to see if timeRemaining has been reduced to zero. If it has, a new square is generated using the Next() method of the rand object. In this form, Next() takes two parameters: an (inclusive) minimum value and a (non-inclusive) maximum value. In this case, the minimum is set to 0, while the maximum is set to the size of the this.Window.ClientBounds property minus 25 pixels. This ensures that the square will always be fully within the game window.

Next, the current position and button state of the mouse is captured into the "mouse" variable via Mouse.GetState(). Both the Keyboard and the GamePad classes also use a GetState() method that captures all of the data about that input device when the method is executed.

If the mouse reports that the left button is pressed, the code checks with the currentSquare object by calling its Contains() method to determine if the mouse's coordinates fall within its area. If they do, then the player has "caught" the square and scores a point. The timeRemaining counter is set to 0, indicating that the next time Update() is called it should create a new square.

After dealing with the user input, the MathHelper.Max() method is used to decrease timeRemaining by an amount equal to the elapsed game time since the last call to Update(). Max() is used to ensure that the value does not go below zero.

Finally, the game window title bar is updated to display the player's score.

Tip

MathHelper

The Microsoft.Xna.Framework namespace provides a class called MathHelper that contains lots of goodies to make your life easier when dealing with numeric data, including converting degrees to and from radians, clamping values between a certain range, and generating smooth arcs between a starting and ending value.

The Draw() method

The final method in the default Game1.cs file is responsible, not surprisingly, for drawing the current game state to the display. Draw() is normally called once after each call to Update() unless something is happening to slow down the execution of your game. In that case, Draw() calls may be skipped in order to call Update() more frequently. There will always be at least one call to Update() between calls to Draw(), however, as sequential Draw() calls would provide no benefit—nothing in the game state will have changed.

The default Draw() method simply clears the display window in the Cornflower Blue color.