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

Classes used in Flood Control


While it would certainly be possible to simply pile all of the game code into the Game1 class, the result would be difficult to read and manage later on. Instead, we need to consider how to logically divide the game into classes that can manage themselves and help to organize our code.

A good rule of thumb is that a class should represent a single thing or type of thing. If you can say, This object is made up of these other objects, or, This object contains these objects, consider creating classes to represent those relationships.

The Flood Control game contains a game board made up of 80 pipe pieces. We can abstract these pipes as a class called GamePiece and provide it with the code it needs to handle rotation, and provide the code that will display the piece with a rectangle that can be used to pull the sprite off the sprite sheet.

The game board itself can be represented by a GameBoard class, which will handle managing individual GamePiece objects and be responsible...