XNA Game Programming Adventures
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August 2, 2010I have just uploaded the next tutorial in my new XNA RPG tutorial series. In this tutorial I did a little more work on the tile engine. I added in scrolling the map and I showed how to have multiple layers and how to use multiple tile sets. You can find the link to the tutorial on the New XNA RPG Tutorials page of my site.
August 1, 2010
The next XNA RPG tutorial has just been uploaded to my web site. In this XNA RPG tutorial I added a basic tile engine to the game. I wouldn't say basic because it already has some advanced features like multiple tile sets for a single map as well as being a layered map. In the next tutorial I will cover scrolling the map using keyboard and game pad movement. You can find the link to the tutorial on the New XNA RPG Tutorials page of my site.
July 30, 2010
I have just uploaded the next tutorial in my new XNA RPG tutorial series. The first thing I did was add in support for the Xbox 360 game pad. In this tutorial I first introduce the idea of using a session for the game. Sessions will be used to create new games, save games, and load games. I also added another screen to the game, added in support for the Xbox 360 game pad, and added in a background component. You can find the link to the tutorial on the New XNA RPG Tutorials page of my site.
July 29, 2010
As you can see, I've redesigned my site. I will be getting a web designer to design the site in the fall. I hope that it is easy to find everything. I would suggest book marking pages that you visit a lot, like the tutorial pages.
I've also added in the first tutorial in my new XNA RPG tutorial series. In this tutorial I create a few basic components that you will use in the game. It is an error to go into creating a large game with out some sort of state, or screen, management. That is where I start these tutorials. I also added in a menu component that will be useful and an input management component. You can find the link to this tutorial on the New RPG Tutorials page of my site.
Since I will be reusing much of the code from the last RPG tutorial series I hope to be able to get a few tutorials up in a relatively quick period of time.
July 16, 2010
I have been working on new XNA RPG tutorials. The problem is that I've been having to back track and fix things that I probably shouldn't have done in the first place. All of these fixes are making it harder and harder to get new tutorials out in my XNA RPG series. I'm proposing a fresh start with much nicer code that will be easy to maintain in the future and easier, I would hope, for you to change to suit your needs. Doing this will allow me to get a lot of RPG tutorials out quickly. I won't be worrying too much on looks, more on getting things working and working in a way that will be easy to use in your own games with little modification. You can use the Contact Form to leave feedback, or better yet, visit my forum XNA GPA Forum and leave feedback on the topic in the Site Feedback forum.
July 9, 2010
I added in the next tutorial in my XNA RPG tutorial series to the site. In this tutotiral I get started on moving to a party based game instead of a single player game. The way I'm going about it the game will be split into chapters and scenes, much like Final Fantasy XIII. The characters in each scene will be dynamic. This is the first part in a few tutorials on the subject. This tutorial was more laying the foundation more than anything else. You can find the tutorial on the XNA RPG Tutorials page of my site.
July 3, 2010
I have just added two new XNA tutorials to my web site. The first is in a series of tutorials that I'm writing about collision detection demonstrated in different games. This one is using the simplest form of collision detection, bounding boxes. The second is in my XNA Screen Manager series that shows an easy way to change the music of your game as the screen changes. It is specific to XNA 3.1 but I will be writing other tutorials on adding music to your game. You can find the tutorials on the XNA Tutorials page of my site.
June 21, 2010
I have just finished and uploaded a new XNA tutorial to my web site. This tutorial is on creating a Break Out style game. It is aimed more at beginners with XNA, though if you are interested in creating a Break Out style game. I'm sure you will be able to pick something up in this two part tutorial series. This first part deals with getting the paddle onto the screen as well as the ball. The ball will bounce around the screen and off the paddle. In the second part I will be adding in the bricks for the ball to break.
I will be doing a more advanced Break Out tutorial series. It will be a complete Break Out style game with menus, a leader board, bricks with different properties, power ups, etc.
May 14, 2010
I add the next XNA RPG tutorial to my site. In this tutorial I took a got started on using management classes to manage game objects rather than having the game object as game components. The reason is that game components have a fair bit of overhead associated with them. Just having one component to manage objects of a class is a much better way to go. Keeping with the items and inventory theme I made the management class for items and chests in the game, as they are related. As always you can find the link to the latest XNA RPG tutorial on the XNA RPG Tutorials page of my site. Be sure to visit my blog at http://xnagpa.net/blog/ for the latest news on my XNA tutorials.
May 4, 2010
I have added another XNA RPG tutorial to my site. In this tutorial I got started on inventory managament, the player character being able to carry, use, sell, buy, pick up, and drop items. Inventory management is one of the harder parts of a role playing game to work on. You need to take a lot into account when you design your inventory management system. The player character should not be able to carry hundreds of pounds of equipment and explore the world as if they were carrying nothing. This rather short XNA RPG tutorial is more of a foundation tutorial for things to come down the road. As always you can find the link to the latest XNA RPG tutorial on the XNA RPG Tutorials page of my site. Be sure to visit my blog at http://xnagpa.net/blog/ for the latest news on my XNA tutorials.
May 1, 2010
I have just added another XNA RPG tutorial to my site. This is the B part of the tutorial that I posted yesterday. I believe in total, the two tutorials are about 40 pages long or more. I finished up with the item editor in this tutorial. I also added in reading in the items in the game in this tutorial as well as having those items placed inside of chests. You can find the link to the tutorial on the XNA RPG Tutorials page of my web site. I have gotten a good start on adding items to the game but there is still a long way to go on these tutorials. I encourage you to keep coming back to my site or you can visit my blog at http://xnagpa.net/blog/ for the latest news on my XNA tutorials.
April 30, 2010
I have just finished and uploaded a new tutorial in my XNA RPG tutorial series. This is part A of a two part tutorial. The reason is that the tutorial was getting to be quite long and I didn't want to throw too much at you at once. This tutorial covers creating an Item Editor for my XNA RPG tutorial series. In this tutorial I cover creating items using the editor, editing items with the editor, and deleting items. In part B I will cover saving items and reading them back in using the editor. I part B of the tutorial, I will also cover reading in the items from the game. As always, you can find the link to the tutorial on the XNA RPG Tutorials page of my site. So, keep coming back as I intend on working on more tutorials. Both for my XNA RPG tutorial series and general XNA tutorials. I see that some would like a tutorial on creaing a break out style game. The one I made was with XNA 2.0 but will update it for XNA 3.0. It will work with XNA 3.1 as well. I just know that there are some out there that prefer XNA 3.0 so that is why I tend to use XNA 3.0 for my tutorials.
April 22, 2010
I have added a new tutorial to my web site as well as a short tutorial on the forum. The tutorial on the forum talks about how to detect a single keypress with XNA. I will add tutorials on mouse clicks and button presses on the game pads as well. The keypress tutorial is available here. The other tutorial is the next tutorial in my XNA RPG tutorial series. In this tutorial I continued on with having the player being able to pick up items. I hadn't planned on the tutorial having any visual aspects but because what I had done was a little brief I decided to continue on and display the contents of the chests instead of just making the item classes. As always, you can find link to the tutorial on the RPG Tutorials page of my site.
April 21, 2010
I have my new blog set up. At the moment there is only the one entry but I do plan on adding much more to the new blog. For now I will be keeping the old pages from my blog and will be updating them as I go. I do plan on eventually phasing out the old blog and replace it with the new. I will also be working on archiving the old posts and the news pages. You can find the blog at http://xnagpa.net/blog/. I have big plans form my site so I hope that you will keep coming back and visit.
April 18, 2010
I have finished configuring the forum! You should now be able to find the forum from the Forum link in the navigation bar. You can also reach the forum from http://xnagpa.net/forum/. I plan on placing all of my tutorials in the forum as well as in PDF format. I also have plans to use Wordpress blog software for my blog and have that up and running soon. I plan on getting back to my tutorials over the course of the next few weeks. I encourage you to keep coming back to see the changes I plan to add to the site.
April 17, 2010
My new site, XNA Game Programming Adventures, is now up and running. Make sure to update your bookmarks to http://xnagpa.net. The old pages will be updated to redirect you to the new site eventually but for now the will remain but will not be updated after today. I'm still working on setting up the forum but very soon it will be online for you to be able join. I've added a page for Xin, my XNA Input Manager game component. Xin is an open source project and you are free to use it in your game. If you would like to learn more about Xin you can read the Xin Documentation PDF. I've also added a widget to the right column for donations if you find my tutorials or open source projects useful.
April 6, 2010
Really big, news here! I now have a new domain name for this site. The new address will be http://xnagpa.net. So if you have been trying to reach my site the past yesterday evening and today and haven't been able to access it that is why. It may take a while for everything to be fully migrated so the old address xna.jtmbooks.com will work for now. When I'm finished there will also be a forum on the site so you can ask questions, report problems with the tutorials, and general questions about XNA and C# programming. So, keep coming back and I hope to have everything up and running in the next few days. Once the new site is fully set up, the old pages will redirect to the proper pages on the new site.
April 5, 2010
I had a request from Tom to remove the headers and footers from my tutorials. He asked because he was saying that he liked to copy and paste the code from the PDF directly into his game. He mentioned that when he did that the headers and footers were being copied into his code and didn't like having to remove the headers and footers from his code. I didn't update tutorial 30 because the original tutorial is not on my hard drive. The tutorials on the zip page haven't been updated yet. The link to download all of the tutorials in one zip file have been updated.
February 11, 2010
I have uploaded the next tutorial in my XNA role playing game tutorial series to my web site. In this tutorial I continued on with adding in items for the player to pick up of the map. There is still more to do related to items but I can't get into that until I add in the classes necessary to handle items and inventory. I plan to do that soon in a future tutorial. Inventory can be a complicated topic. I will be using inheritance and polymorphism in dealing with inventory as well as interfaces. Interfaces are related to classes. They are basically contracts that the class that uses them must implement. I used the ICloneable interface when I dealt with animating sprites. I will be creating the interfaces that will need to be implemented though. As always, you can find the link to the tutorial on the RPG Tutorials page of my web site. If you are interested in seeing the results of the tutorial you can check out the Screenshots page of my site.
February 9, 2010
I have just uploaded two new tutorials to my web site on creating a screen manager with XNA. In the first tutorial I show how to add support for the Xbox 360 game pad to the screen manager. In the second tutorial I show how to create a pop up screen that you can use to ask a yes or no question from the player of your game. You can find the links to the tutorials on the XNA Tutorials page of my web site.
I will be continuing on with my role playing game tutorial series tonight and I hope to have that tutorial available for download on my web site shortly.
February 4, 2010
I have just uploaded the latest tutorial on creating a role playing game with XNA to my web site. In this tutorial I got started on adding items for the player to pick up. In the next tutorial in the XNA role playing game series I will handle collision with chests and being able to pick things up. To handle picking up things I will be adding a new screen to the game. This pop up screen will display the items that the player has found, along with any gold that is in the chest. You can find the link to the tutorial on the RPG Tutorials page of my web site. You can find a screen shot of the game with the chests the player will be picking up on the Screenshots page.
January 28, 2010
I have just added a new tutorial in my XNA role playing game series to the site. I just made a couple minor fixes in this tutorial. One thing that I did was get rid of the bar at the bottom of the action screen because I decided to handle text in pop ups, it was an eye sore, and it gives the player a bigger playing field to play on. There are new graphics for the buttons and the pop up screens. You don't technically need to use most of them but you should at least use the one for the dialogs with NPCs. Another thing that I did in this tutorial had to do with getting input from the player. There were several copies of the methods that checked for key presses and button presses, I changed things so there is only methods in the main game class. The last thing I changed in this tutorial had to do with starting conversations with NPCs. I was testing the game and I found using the A button to start a conversatoin and the B button to handle the menu was a little hard to get used to. I changes it so you use the B button to start conversations and the Enter key instead of the space bar. You can find the link to this tutorial on the RPG Tutorials page of my web site.
January 25, 2010
Sorry it has been so long and that I did quit writing these tutorials for a while but I'm excited to say that I'm back writing tutorials, including my RPG tutorials. I've added in a new tutorial in the XNA RPG tutorials series. In this tutorial I added in support for the Xbox 360 controller to the game. Everything that you can do with the keyboard you can also do with the controller. I did make a few modifications to how the menus work. You can only select items using the Enter key, not the Space key. You can also move the selection using the direction pad of the controller and make a selection using the B button. On the action screen, you can bring up th stats window using the Y button on the controller. You can find the link to the tutorial on the RPG Tutorials page of the web site.
Good luck with your XNA game programming adventures.
Jamie McMahon
Latest News
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July 29, 2010
1st New RPG tutorail!
July 9, 2010
54th XNA RPG tutorial!
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