A Good Beginner XNA Tutorial
I've always wanted to create video games since I was a wee little tike knee-high to a grasshopper (we had giant grasshoppers that stood five feet tall in Michigan FYI). That's why it's so great the Microsoft really seems to be making an effort to draw in those with game developer aspirations to their XNA framework. XNA.com is a site the created full of tutorials and with a health community of novice and professional game creators.
I was getting heavy into this stuff when I first started this blog, but have since had my attention pulled away in other directions. Today I found the time to start going through one of the tutorials on XNA.com for 2D programming. The tutorial of which I speak can be found at http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bg2d/chapter1.
I think this is a great tutorial (video tutorial though, I would much prefer it to be written out so I could read at my own pace) for a beginner to XNA. It touches on important things like how the game loop works, something that I have found other tutorials often ignore despite it being very important (many just say write this code here, write that code there but fail to explain why).
My only real complaint is that it assumes that you've got no experience game programming and no experience with C#. That's great if you don't, but if you're someone like me that has done this before and programs daily in C#, it can be rather slow going.
I'm only half way through the tutorial, but I've already got a game drawing the background, allowing user input, and displaying my movements on screen. I'll finish this tutorial out hopefully tonight and see what I can do about posting this game here online for you to all see. I'd really like to take this as a jumping-off point and see if I could develop a much more interesting game. If nothing else, I'm learning some new stuff and brushing up on others.
If you're at all interested in game programming, I really suggestion you take a look at XNA. You can get all the tools you need to develop games for free from Microsoft and there are a number of tutorials like this available online today.
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