Preparing your toolbox!
Now that we’ve been through the basics of how a game works (Anatomy of a game series starts here), it’s time we start to actually create our own games. Before we do that though, we’ll need to put together a collection of tools that will help us along the way.
The Framework!
The primary software development kit we will be using to develop games is the XNA Game Community Platform. It’s the obvious choice for me since I work on that team ;) But really, it’s a very good and easy to use framework. With XNA Framework, you will be able to develop games that run both on Windows and your Xbox 360. How cool is that?
So how do you get started with XNA Game Studio Express (XNA GSE)? Simple, follow the Getting Started instructions prepared by the XNA Community Game Platform team. Once you install XNA GSE, do yourself a favor and create a new project and use the Spacewars starter kit. It’s a ready to run game that is quite entertaining and should wet your appetite for what you can do with the framework.
Update: XNA Game Studio 2.0 Beta has just been released. You probably want to pick this one up since that’s the version I will use for my blog. You can get it from here.
Graphics Creation Tools
Now that you have XNA GSE set up and running, you will want to fetch some basic content editing tools. By content, I mean graphical content like images, 3D models and so forth. We’ll start simple at first, so in reality, something like Microsoft Paint will do fine at first, but it won’t harm us to get a good set of tools off the bat.
Image Creation/Editing tools:
For starters, let’s get us a couple of programs that we can use to create and manipulate images:
Paint.Net
Paint.Net is a very cool image manipulation program that is written in C# and .NET. It does what we need very well and comes at a very good price: Free. You can pick up a copy from Paint.Net website. You will quickly learn to love this little program!
Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)
This is one of my favorite tools to use. If you’re familiar with Adobe Photoshop, then Gimp will make a lot of sense to you. Gimp is basically an open source alternative to Photoshop. You can do a whole lot of really cool stuff using Gimp. So when the job is bigger than Paint.Net can handle, I jump over to Gimp to get it done! Gimp is open source and runs on a lot of different Operating Systems including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, etc. The official Gimp site is here. But you’ll probably want to download the Windows version which is provided as an installer from here.
3D Modeling
When we get to 3D graphics, we’ll want to start messing around with creating and editing 3D models. There are a lot of tools out there that we can use. The ones I am somewhat familiar with are:
SoftImage XSI Mod Tool
SoftImage XSI Mod tool is a free lite version of XSI’s bigger and professional 3D modeling package. The cool thing about this version is that it is XNA aware. SoftImage have done a lot of work to make this version work very well with XNA. Go pick up a copy from their official website.
Blender
Open source strikes again! Blender is the Gimp of 3D modeling tools pretty much. Blender is a pretty powerful, yet somewhat difficult to use, 3D modeling package that is totally free. There is a lot of documentation provided by Blender and the community to teach you how to use it. Just like Gimp, Blender runs on a variety of operating system including Windows. Blender can be downloaded from their official website.
Wings 3D
This one is a pretty cool quick and dirty modeling tool. If you want to throw together a decently looking model pretty quick (read: Programmer’s Art), then you will want to use Wings 3D. Grab a copy from their official website.
Misc Tools
Last but not least is a collection of useful to have tools.
Notepad++
Every one should have some sort of text editor that they are comfortable with. The one I am using now is Notepad++. Simple to use, has syntax highlighting, etc. There are a lot of other good editors out there, you probably already have a favorite one.
Powershell
Your toolbox is not complete without a good and solid command shell. You can always use the Windows cmd.exe shell. It works fine and will take care for *most* of your needs. But when you start looking for real power and flexibility, you want Powershell. Powershell is Microsoft’s new command shell that is based on the .Net framework. It is simply amazing and fun to use. You have full access to all the .Net framework directly from the shell or in your scripts. Scripts use a C# like syntax which is easy to pick up. There is a lot to know about powershell, you can always start with my Powershell section of my blog.
Final Thoughts
Everyone’s toolbox is very custom to their needs, you will end up with a set of tools that is much larger than the ones I listed here. Eventually, you may end up replacing all the ones I mentioned with other more powerful ones. This list is a beginning of sorts, learn to use these tools and you’re journey in game development will be that much easier. As I start talking about more topics, I will always point out some cool tools that make life easier for that specific topic.
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