Gemstone Hunter implements the basics of a platform-style game, allowing the player to move around on a tile-based game world. Key concepts from the Gemstone Hunter game include:
An alternative approach to sprite-based animation, using animation strips whose dimensions determine the number of frames in the animation instead of specifying the individual frames from a larger sprite sheet
Deriving multiple game object types from a base type and specializing the behavior of each of the child types while maintaining basic interaction with the game world from the base class
Implementing gravity and tile map-based collisions to allow the player to explore the game world
Parsing the map codes we generated in the Level Editor to populate the game world with gemstones and enemies when a level is loaded
Allowing the player to interact with hidden map code for functionality such as level transitions and deadly areas
You've done it! With your first four XNA games completed, I hope that you now have...