For this post, I decided to spend some time answering some frequently asked questions that some of you may or may not be thinking of right now. I remember at this stage of my learning, I started to wonder about how to do certain things. So let’s dive right in! Read more...

In my last post, we talked about textures in general and how to use them. This post will talk about a fun and important aspect of using textures in 2D games: Animation. Say you have a 2D game and you have Wizard character that the player controls and it can cast a spell. It would be boring if the wizard did not have any cool animation to indicate that he is casting a spell. This is where animation comes handy! We can use animation to make a 2D image appear to be alive and have motion. Read more...

The subject of today’s topic is one that is quite interesting to me and something you will probably spend sometime playing around with. I want to talk about Textures, specifically Texture2D class in the framework. If we’re going to talk about Textures, then we will have to talk about SpriteBatch as well since that’s the class we use to draw textures on the screen. Read more...

In my last post, we created a very simple “Hello World” game in XNA. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it served the purpose of introducing XNA project template and getting us familiar with what’s in the code. But let’s face it, it wasn’t a game… not even close to being one. Putting text on the screen that doesn’t move is quite boring. Time to spice things up a bit and get to learn about user input while we’re at it. Read more...

In the last post I made, we saw how to create a XNA game project and run it. It didn’t do anything fancy at all, just a blue screen. Now let’s take it further and explain the code that is generated by the project template and extend it to display a nice “Hello World” text on the screen. Baby steps everyone, baby steps! Read more...

Alright, I’ll be honest from the get go… this won’t really be a “game”. It won’t be interactive, and it most certainly won’t be fun. What it will be though is a game based on the XNA Game Framework and will use the graphics card and all that good stuff. Consider it the “Hello World” of gaming if you will. Let’s see how this will work! Read more...