All right! I’ve finally made my first game using the Microsoft XNA Framework!
XNA is Microsoft’s platform for creating games for Windows and the XBOX360. This is all pretty cool because not only you get to make the actual games, you also share them with the online community. This makes it possible for other users world wide to try your inventions and ideas.
When I created this space cannon game, I just followed a simple tutorial I found at the XNA community web site. But hey, let’s face it, even if the project could be considered child’s play we all need to start out somewhere, right? The tutorial took me about 3-4 hours to complete (spent 2 nights on it) and it covered at least some of the major aspects of simple 2D game development, such as creating and manipulating game objects during runtime, drawing graphics and collision detection. So all in all, it was definitively worth the while.
If you are completely new to the XNA Framework, do pay the community a visit at www.creators.xna.com. The framework (currently up in the version 3.0) can be downloaded for free, and is compatible with Visual Studio 2008! (Hurray for that!)
