The Mailowl Scrolls

After an exhausting week (which I’ll tell you about on Sunday) I sat down and got all the XNA pieces together to start testing.

For a quick recap you need: Visual C# Express, the August 2006 DirectX End-User Runtimes and of course Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express (Beta)

So far it’s pretty much what I expected, C# Express with a bunch of libraries and you have to do a lot of the work yourself. Well almost all yourself!

To create an XNA Game is very much like starting a normal Windows forms or web application, open C# Express and click create project and choose Windows Game (XNA). The option to make an Xbox game will come later as XNA rolls out of the Beta cycle.

The first BIG PLUS is that they’ve given us a default game loop to run in and this is essential for any aspiring or rapid game developer. Previously you had to create your own; which to do properly required some Win32 API calls, nasty! (I suggest reading Robert Dunlop’s article to learn more about what a game loop is). Now you can get on with making your game objects and spend less time just getting the application to run.

With that basic essential out of the way the next bonus I discovered (after a quick check to the XNA forums to see on the progress of XNA for VB.Net) was the extensive help available to get a new developer going. I’ve included a picture in this post from the Contents window of Document Explorer of the XNA help, and you can see that it’s packed with “How to”s for the beginning developer.

Sadly the object definitions are a little lacking, but the explanations more than make up for this and I’m sure we’ll see more as time passes.

It was my biggest gripe learning DirectX that you have to be a consummate DirectX developer to learn from the DirectX help and I think with their target market being students and hobbyist developers the attitude has changed about what needs to go into the documentation.

So now what’s left for me is to make a sample game for you to see and already I’m grateful for all the learnings I’ve gotten from Game Maker and the Game.Dev community about building objects and game design. I already have written down what my “mini” game will do and how the objects will interact with each other.

Honestly, I can’t see myself migrating to XNA Express soon. I’ve still got a lot I need to learn with tools like Game Maker (like surfaces, blending and stencils) before I move to a framework, and I still recommend Game Maker for anyone interested in making games. This is just a fun distraction so that I can answer questions at the SA Developer sessions.