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XBox Games development with Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express

By Vishal Khanna

Its like a magic. With a little knowledge of any .NET based language like C# or VB.NET, now you may create your own games, implement your dream games on your own and ultimately create games for XBox. This may be done by seamlessly integrating XNA Game Studio Express (available as free download) with Visual Studio.

As the demand for game development is ever increasing, Microsoft has introduced the XNA Game Studio, open for the hobbyists, students, geeks and professionals to create games that run on XBox by using the set of reusable tools provided with the XNA suite. Earlier launched as the XNA Game Studio Express, now the tag Express has been removed as the Beta version is finally a full released version now.

XNA Game Studio works on VS 2005, and now on VS 2008 too. Make sure to download XNA Version 2.0. May check out this link for that ... http://creators.xna.com

Once the XNA Framework 2.0 is downloaded and installed on the development system, any project, say a Windows Based Project may be created in Visual Studio. Add a reference to Microsoft.Xna.Framework for this project.

XNA Game Studio has been packed with complete functionality for 3rd Party support and Windows. The main aim of Microsoft is to provide people across the globe simple to use and affordable tools enabling people to come out with their creativity and ideas.

XNA Game Studio supports creation of both 2D and 3D Gaming applications. There are other 3rd Party Tools like GarageGames Torque X which is a toolset designed specially for XNA Game Studio Express.

XNA empowers game developers to create different shapes like circles, triangles and this ranges till 3-Dimensional human beings in games. To begin with, I would suggest game developers to try out their hand in writing 2-Dimensional games, and gradually proceed towards writing advanced games with 3D effects. The development environment in XNA Game Studio is as simple as cream.

To learn how to use XNA Game studio, the following tasks need to be taken care of:

  • How to install XNA Game Studio?
  • How to open XNA projects in Visual Studio?
  • How to render 2D images to the user interface?
  • How to rotate, scale and position images?
  • How to handle keyboard events?
  • How to invoke sound effects based on events?
  • How to manipulate images per pixel?
  • How to generate random terrain slopes?
  • What is alpha blending?
  • How to figure out collisions between moving objects?

Once you learn how to perform the basic activities like the ones pointed above, you shall be ready to buzz out with your own version of original XBox games.

Happy Programming.

Cheers!