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 – creating the Asteroid Belt Assault project


  1. Visit http://www.PacktPub.com and download the 0669_04_GRAPHICPACK.ZIP file. Extract the file to a temporary location.

  2. Open Visual Studio Express Edition, and create a new XNA 4.0 Windows Game project called Asteroid Belt Assault.

  3. In the Asteroid Belt AssaultContent project, right-click on the project name, select Add | New Folder, and add a folder called Textures. Add another folder called Fonts.

  4. Right-click on Textures, and add the SpriteSheet.png and TitleScreen.png files from the graphics pack to the project.

  5. Add declarations to the Game1 class for game states and textures as follows:

    Public Enum GameStates
        TitleScreen
        Playing
        PlayerDead
        GameOver
    End Enum
    Private gameState As GameStates = GameStates.TitleScreen
    Private titleScreen As Texture2D
    Private spriteSheet As Texture2D
  6. Update the LoadContent() method to load the sprite sheet:

    titleScreen = Content.Load(Of Texture2D)("Textures\TitleScreen")
    spriteSheet = Content...