XNA Game Programming Adventures
Tutorials

Welcome to my the XNA Tutorials page on my site XNA Game Programming Advenutres. I will be writing other tutorials on game programming with XNA that do not have to do with my role playing game tutorials. I will be posting those tutorials on this page.

The first set of tutorials that I am working on is on creating a tile engine with XNA Game Studio. I will be making a game library for the tile engine so if you like the tile engine all you have to do is just add it to your project and add the refernce to it in your game. On the right there is the output from the tile engine that I have started working on. I didn't use the 32-bit tiles that I used for the role playing game. The tiles were from a tile set that I found on the internet. It will be an easy process for you to add the tiles that you would like to use in the engine. I am gonig to try and make a very functional tile engine. You will be able to scroll the map using the arrow keys or the numeric key pad.

The other tutorials series that I will be working on is creating a state manager for your games. Managing the state of game can be a hard thing to do. I do have a method that makes it much simpler though. I am using the basic idea in my role playing game tutorials but it is a simple matter to create a state manager that you can use to handle the different states of the game. When I'm talking about states what I mean is you have the introduction state, possibly a splash screen or the screen I used in the role playing game. Then you have your main menu where the player chooses what they want to do. If you are writing a multiplayer game you might have a lobby where the players will wait to join the game. Then you have the actual game play to handle.

Begginer XNA Break Out Tutorials

These beginner XNA tutorials on creating a Break Out style game. They go into the basics of the game and are not meant to be a full game. The advanced XNA Break Out tutorials will be a complete XNA game with more features found in an XNA game.

Part 1 - The Paddle and the Ball
This is the first tutorial in my XNA Break Out beginner tutorial series. It covers getting the paddle on the screen and being controlled by the player. It also covers adding in the ball and having it bounce around the screen.

Breaking Out Tutorial 1
Breaking Out Tutorial 1 - Zipped

XNA Tile Engine Tutorials

These tutorials are the tutorials in my simple XNA tile engine tutorial series. They are meant to introduce how to make a basic tile engine with XNA.

Part 1 - Simple Tile Engine
This is the first part in a simple XNA tile engine tutorial series. In this tutorial I cover the basics of tiling. What tiling is and one way you can do tiling with XNA. Tile engines are used for many different types of games including platformers, role playing games, and strategy games.

Tile Engine Tutorial 1
Tile Engine Tutorial 1 - Zipped

Part 2 - Scrolling the Map
In this second tile engine tutorial I cover the basics of scrolling a tile map in just one direction at time and only in cardinal directions, up, down, left, and right. I introduce the idea of using a camera to control the scrolling of the map. In a future tutorial I will cover adding a camera class to the tile engine.

Tile Engine Tutorial 2
Tile Engine Tutorial 2 - Zipped

Part 3 - Adding a Camera Class
In this tutorial I added in a 2D camera class to work with the tile engine to control the scrolling. On reason for using a camera class is that if you are developing a split screen game you can use the class instead of having a lot of variables and duplicating code. I also cover scrolling the map at the same speed in all directions.

Tile Engine Tutorial 3
Tile Engine Tutorial 3 - Zipped

Part 4 - Increasing Efficiency
At the moment the tile engine is a little inefficient. In this tutorial I will make it a little more efficient. Two things that are inefficient is that the tile engine is drawing all tiles, even if they are not on the screen. Another thing is that each time through the nested loops that draws the tiles I was creating a Rectangle object. That takes time and uses resources. It is much better if you do that just the once at the start of the drawing code.

Tile Engine Tutorial 4
Tile Engine Tutorial 4 - Zipped

You can find the latest version of the Tile Engine at this link.
Tile Engine Source Code

Collision Detection Tutorials

These tutorials will get you started with collision detecteion in your games. As they progress they will introduce more and more concepts in collision detection. They will be introduced in simple games where each type of collision detection is used.

Bounding Box Collision Detection
The simplest form of collision detection is bounding boxes. You make a bounding box, rectangle, around the each object in the game and if they intersect then the objects collide. I introduce this type of collision in the game of Pong played by two players.
Bounding Box Collision Detection
Bounding Box Collision Detection - Zipped

XNA Screeen Management Tutorials

These tutorials will get you started on handling screen management with your game. When games get larger with many screens they can become hard to manage. If you start out with a screen management system to begin with you will be able to better organize your code and your game will be easier to manage.

Part 1 - Creating the Menu
To get started with a screen management system I decided to start out making a menu component. One reason is that menus are a common part of games they control the flow of the game, at least partially, between game states.

XNA Screen Management Tutorial 1
XNA Screen Management Tutorial 1 - Zipped

Part 2 - Creating Game Screens
With the menu component it is now easy to navigate between the screens of the game. In this tutorial I cover adding in different screens for a game. I start with a main menu or start screen. From the menu you can start the game or move to the game screen. There is no game and the screens have different background images. This is just to introduce the concept of managing the state of the game using different game screens.

XNA Screen Management Tutorial 2
XNA Screen Management Tutorial 2 - Zipped

Part 2A - Adding in Music
Quite often you want different music in the different screens of your game. This tutorial was written to show one way that you can add that functionality into your games with the screen manager that I use. I wrote it to take place after the second tutorial but could easily be extended to take place after the other screen manager tutorials. This one is specific to XNA 3.1 and will not work with XNA 3.0 because of changes made between XNA 3.0 and XNA 3.1. I am looking into writing another one that will work with XNA 3.0. This tutorial does not use XACT. Instead it uses the SoundEffect and SoundEffectInstance classes. I will write one using XACT as well.

XNA Screen Management Tutorial 2A
XNA Screen Management Tutorial 2A - Zipped

Part 3 - Xbox 360 Game Pad Support
The screen managment tutorials so far worked with the keyboard. For games on the Xbox 360 you should have suppport for the Xbox 360 game pad. In this additional tutorial I cover add in support for the Xbox 360 game pad.

XNA Screen Management Tutorial 3
XNA Screen Management Tutorial 3 - Zipped

Part 4 - Creating Pop Up Screens
A common task when you are making games is to have a little pop up screen to ask for action to be taken. You don't want to cover the entire screen but you want the game to stop updating until the action has been confirmed. In this bonus tutorial I cover creating a pop up screen that will keep the game from updating but still render. There are techniques you can use to grey out the screen and other effects with XNA that I don't go into in this tutorial.

XNA Screen Management Tutorial 4
XNA Screen Management Tutorial 4 - Zipped


I will also be working on other shorter tutorials that I think might be helpful as well as tutorial series on different types of games.

Good luck with your XNA game programming adventures.

Jamie McMahon

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