Well I spent basically all day working with XNA and I must say IT ROCKS. I have never written a game before in my life and I almost have a basic space invaders done. Some of the logic got hold of me, but that was the coolest part of the whole process I only really needed spend time on the logic. I didn’t have to worry about much of anything else like createing a device and a good render loop etc. I just opened up the Template for XNA game and started coding I had to do some preliminary stuff to add the sprite to the scene and render it about 5 lines per sprite is all. The rest was all code for game logic.

Now, you can tell XNA is still beta because there is a lot of stuff missing. There is not networking or the usual excellent documentation. However, the MSDN forums are making up for the lack of documentation on XNA because they guys there learn faster than me and all of us are posting and helping. Like they have bouding boxes for collision detection for 2d and 3d objects well I for the life of me couldn’t figure out well some else did and I luckily got the code for it. Now after looking at the code I felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner, but hey what can i say I am not the strongest coder and have a lot to learn so I can give myself a little bit of slack.

So, the two things I have left for my space invaders game is to actually be able to shoot and doing the Collision detection. So all in all I should be done tommorow evening. My biggest problem about my goal of getting a game done tonight was lack of knowledge. However, I plan to rectify that by spending quite a bit of time with XNA so I can help others and maybe they won’t have to go through what I had to go through.

I also plan to write up a mini-tutorial over my game after I submit it for review by more experience programmers because to me I am doing things overly complex there has to be an easier way to do my game code. We will see what happens.

If you want to learn more here are some resources:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=20&SiteID=1
http://learnxna.com/
http://www.XNASpot.com/
http://xbox360homebrew.com/
http://www.dev360.de/
http://www.xnaproject.com/
http://www.xnadevelopment.com/

Happy coding,
Buddy Lindsey