Some of you may be asking… where did I go? Why no new posts? Or…maybe you’re not asking that, but I’ll go with my first thought! I am still here totally alive and kicking. Got back to work from the holidays and been kind of busy ever since. That doesn’t mean that I forgot about my blog though. Now that we’ve been through enough basics to qualify us to write a game, I’ve been thinking of one to blog about. Here’s what I am thinking about…
One of the things I tend to see a lot on our forums is people asking for more tutorials and posts about how to actually write a game vs how to use the framework to do standalone things. There are plenty of posts and articles on the net on how to draw models, textures, etc. But not very many that will walk you through writing your own game and structuring it. That is what I am about to tackle with my next series of posts.
I am thinking of putting together a series of posts detailing how to write a simple 2D game. The posts will talk about concepts such as:
- Designing your game from a gameplay point of view.
- Designing your game code structure.
- How to use some of the cool concepts in XNA GS such as components and services.
- Learning some more cool effects like background scrolling, etc
- How to design a level and have your game load it up and use it
- Maybe even touch a bit on 2D effects using slightly advanced topics such as shaders
- and more…
Through this exercise, I am hoping that all the concepts would be very clear through seeing them in action step by step in an actual game that we build together.
So that’s what I’ve been up to for a while now. I am starting to work on it now (like really now) and am hoping to have some posts up during this week or so. Stay tuned :)
Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts, feel free to leave a comment below. Don't forget to subscribe to my RSS Feed!
Nice idea! It’s really hard to find this kind of stuff on the web.
Glad you like it :) I am pretty confident that with enough time, and being armed with awesome game developers around me at work that I can utilize, that these posts should be somewhat helpful!
Hey,
I just want to say thankyou for the fantastic site, I’ve learnt a lot of the basics of XNA Game Studio in a couple of ours thanks to you and eagerly await every new tutorial!
Hey Sowdi :)
Thank you very much for the feedback! It means a lot to me to know that this site helped someone get familiar with XNA. I hope I can keep up with it and deliver more tutorials you’d find useful.
Looks like this will be a very good series of tutorials – looking forward to them.
Your observation about people on forums asking for tutorials on designing a game rather than using the framework was interesting and has prompted me to offer a related observation of my own.
Considering the XNA Framework comes with complete game starter kits, how come there are no game and code design documents included with the kits? Surely the coders of these games did not just sit down at the keyboard and start typing?
I just started larning C# and all the programming books on the language I read tell you how important it is to design before sitting down to the keyboard? I’ve also had the pleasure of doing some freelance game dialogue writing for a commercial game and, while at the developers offices, I saw plenty of design documents in a ‘Game Design Bible’ – so professional game devs appear to place great importance on design stages and documentation.
Yet despite this, game programming litrature frequently fails to mention or cover the design stages. Maybe this is because, as you have observed, most tutorials and books focus on using the various parts of a framework rather than on the design of an actual game itself – but surely there’s no excuse for the starter kits code?
I’m especially interested in learning how to use common tools and methods for designing code in this day and age of Object-Oriented programming. Tools such as UML, Use Cases etc. Are these design tools and methodologies even used by game programmers? If so we certainly need to see more of this side of game design.
Awesome blog by the way, keep it up :)