Game Development in C# using XNA

[pro4never]

I apologize as I know this is a mostly German section.

What is XNA

XNA is a game development framework designed by Microsoft for use with .Net programming languages (usually C# but there is some VB support now). Using XNA we can create high quality games of all types and the framework can often be allowed to handle most of the nitty gritty details such as managing input devices, content management and interfacing with our graphics device.

What Qualifies me to Teach?

Short answer: Nothing

Long Answer: I've been a very active member and moderator of the Conquer Online section on EPvP. In my time here I've released countless guides, sources and tutorials focusing on C#. In that time (as well as my education in school) I feel that I've learned quite a bit. Game development is something that is very interesting to me and as such I've been working on learning the XNA framework for the last while and come up with some rather enjoyable projects. I feel I'm now to the point where my insight might be of some use to others and I've decided to do what I can to help.

What do these guides cover?

I just created the blog tonight but in that time I've completed my introduction to XNA course. This course only covers the XNA framework and is not designed to teach you C# or basic programming logic. That being said, little to no programming knowledge is required and at most you would need to read an extra page or two on google to keep up.

Currently the tutorials cover
-Installing XNA/Visual Studio
-Creating a Project
-Differences between XNA what you may have used before (Polling vs Event Driven Programming, Game loop, etc)
-Handling Keyboard Input
-Loading Content (textures, fonts) using the ContentManager
-Drawing sprites
-Drawing text
-Interactive Objects
-Basic logic
-Introduction to GameComponents to modularize your projects.

Tutorial Links

I've created a simple blog to host these courses on.

[pro4never]

I've gone ahead and started on the second set of tutorials which will cover creating a 2D game from start to finish (in this case a Tetris Clone).



I'll assume the lack of response is due to the thread being in English... sorry about that, language barriers suck all around but hopefully some of you guys find this useful.

[3Angle]

Will you make more tutorials?
Will you work with 3D?

[pro4never]

Originally Posted by 3Angle

Will you make more tutorials?
Will you work with 3D?

Yes.

XNA 020 is complete basics of XNA
XNA 100 is focused on program design, 2D graphics and more advanced XNA concepts


XNA 250 will be focused on transitioning to a 3d environment.

Currently I'm thinking I'll go with a minecraft clone. This will be covering the following topics.

-Introductory 3D math and graphics
-Navigating a 3D Environment
-Procedural content generation
-Program Scalability

Can then look at some more advanced things like

-Terrain editing (add/remove blocks)
-Saving/Loading map data
-Simple physics (player character, gravity, etc)


Obviously any more 'advanced' features would be left out of this tutorial and there's many, many subdivisions of these topics but this is what I have planned so far.


For reference, here's the (very basic) XNA engine I wrote when teaching myself this stuff. I'd be doing a tutorial to make something along the same lines most likely.

[ph03nixx]

hey pro4never, you still gonna keep this up? I'm gonna get back to coding, and focus mainly on game programming.

[crazyjames]

how long would it take to make a game using this code??