Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Building Your First Game Application
Welcome to 'Learning C# by Programming Games'! In this topic, you're going to
learn how to make your own games. At the same time, you will learn the basics
of one of the most popular programming paradigms ever: object-oriented program-
ming. After you have finished reading this topic, you will be able to make games for
different platforms that are ready to be exploited commercially. The skills you will
have acquired will help you create professional-looking games, but they will also
help you build other kinds of applications. As you will see, building games can be
as much (or even more!) fun than playing them. However, before you start making
your own games, we need to make sure that you have all the tools available in order
to get started. The main tool set that we're going to use is the XNA Game Studio by
Microsoft. In this chapter, we're going to walk step-by-step through the process of
transforming your computer into a game development machine.
Website—
Along with this topic, we have created a website where you can
download all the example programs used in this topic, the accompanying
game assets (sprites and sounds), as well as other extras. The URL of this
website is
http://www.csharpprogramminggames.com
.
Go there and follow
the instructions to get the extra materials.
1.1 Structure of This Topic
Each chapter in this topic has its own collection of example programs. You can find
all the examples on the website belonging to this topic. We will explain all of the
programming concepts according to these examples. The topic is globally divided
into five parts. The first part serves as an introduction to programming in general,
and it shows how games are generally developed. We will introduce basic program-
ming concepts such as variables, methods, and parameters. We'll also introduce the
game loop and how to deal with game assets such as sprites and sounds.
