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

Adding the player


So, we now have a working tile map, and what looks like a piece of a robotic vehicle that we can move around on the map. However, there are a number of issues right now:

  • The robot we can move around simply floats around without animation or direction.

  • Our floating sprite does not obey any kind of screen or world limitations. It will happily fly off into oblivion if you hold down the movement keys.

  • Similarly, the sprite is not blocked by wall tiles. It will float right over them.

  • Moving the sprite to the right or bottom edges of the screen doesn't scroll the camera to follow the sprite. Our camera is currently controlled by a separate set of movement keys.

In order to begin addressing these issues, we need to construct a class for the player's robo-tank. If you look at the SpriteSheet.png image, you will see that the player's robot is split into a couple of pieces. The treaded base that we currently have floating around on the screen will provide the base for the player's character...