Building Your First Game Application - Learning C# by Programming Games - page 3

In the second part of the topic we will develop our first game called Painter .We
will introduce the if -instruction, as well as loops using for or while . Furthermore
we'll present the basics of object-oriented programming using the Painter game as
an example. We'll also show how game objects are generally designed as a part of
software, and how to create a game world consisting of interacting game objects.
In part three we will continue setting up this structure of communicating game
objects by introducing arrays and collections. These programming concepts are very
important for the second game, Jewel Jam , which is a pattern recognition game. We
will also show how to create games that run in full screen and how to maintain and
display a score.
Part four introduces the puzzle game Penguin Pairs . Here, we will show how to
deal with different game states such as menus or level selection screens. We'll also
discuss how to read levels from files and how to store the player's progress in a file.
We will show how to deal with strips or sheets of sprites effectively. Finally we will
look at organizing classes into different libraries that can be used across different
game projects.
The final part revolves around the platform game Tick Tick . In this part we will deal
with loading and playing animations, and we will add basic physics to the game
world, such as the possibility to jump or fall, or collide with other game objects.
We'll also show how to deal with exceptions.
For each part, we provide a number of programming exercises to help you get
more familiar with the concepts introduced in that part. We will also give you a
number of challenges. Challenges are more complicated programming exercises,
and they will generally be extensions of the games we develop in this topic, or
sometimes even completely new games! All exercises and challenges can be found
in Appendix A .
1.2 Getting and Installing the Tools
In order to develop computer games, a few tools need to be installed on your com-
puter. The main tool that you're going to need is the XNA Game Studio software,
in combination with a development environment called Visual Studio Express 2010 ,
created by Microsoft. On the accompanying website, you can find detailed instruc-
tions on how to obtain and install these tools. The Visual Studio Express 2010 en-
vironment is freely available and compatible with the latest XNA Game Studio ver-
sion (4.0 when this topic was printed). Once you have installed the development
environment, try to run it. When it has launched, you will see a screen similar to
Fig. 1.1 .
1.3 Creating Your First Game Application
Now that all the tools are installed, let's try and see if everything works the way
it should. In order to test this, we are going to create a project . A project is the