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

Sound effects


Sound effects add a level of feedback to your game that, when missing, will be very noticeable to players. Even in situations where sound effects are not realistic (you would not actually hear explosions in space), their absence would feel wrong while playing.

Generating and finding sound effects

There are a number of sound effects freely available on the web that can be tracked down with a little searching. Locating truly royalty free sound effects is a bit harder. Most of the sound effects archives on the web are not the actual originators of the sound files, so their true licensing requirements may be difficult to track down.

You can always record your own effects if you have a way to simulate sounds. In the case of Asteroid Belt Assault, the sound effects were generated using a program called "sfxr". This application, available at http://www.drpett er.se/project_sfxr.html includes full source code, and produces basic sound effects via random generation.

Sound in XNA

There are...