Today we will talk about the next step in my project “Odyssey” game series. We have already talked about why we need to design a game, and then I attempted to design my own game which I call “Odyssey”. Now that we know what we’re trying to build, it’s time to prepare our “workbench” with the tools we need! One of the coolest samples we have released is the Game State Management sample. This sample gives you a working template you can use to create game menus, options, pop up messages, etc. I will be using this sample in project “Odyssey” to handle all the menus and game options. Trust me, this is saving me a whole lot of time! Let’s see how this sample works. Read more...

As promised in my previous post, today I’ll try to take a stab at designing my own game. I told you  how important the game design process is and how you should know all that there is to know about your game before writing any code. Well, turns out that it’s not a very easy thing to do! I spent a few days brainstorming in my head and trying to come up with what I wanted to do. Finally, I got a good grasp on the major game mechanics I wanted to do and started to dig deeper and find more ideas. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. Read more...

This is the first post in my “Building a game” series! The aim of this series is to walk through building a game from scratch and try to include as much of the thought process involved as possible. So how about you grab yourself something to drink and let’s sit and chat about game design! Read more...

Starting off 2008 with some collision detection! Now that we’ve slowly learned how to work with XNA framework, we’re getting very close to knowing most of what we need to build an actual playable – and maybe even a fun – game. Let’s get right to it then: What is collision detection? Read more...

Now that we have learned how to render basic 2D textures and can actually start making a game, we probably should talk about how Input works in a game. Unless your game is one where the player has to sit there and just stare at it (at which point you’re probably attempting a hypnosis game for some disturbing reason… do let me know if you got a working version though), you want to have them actually control something in it. So how does Input work in XNA Game Framework? Turns out that it’s pretty simple actually. Let’s talk Input! Read more...