November 2008
Intermediate to advanced
512 pages
12h 6m
English
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Chapter 1. Alien Attack
AUTHOR: Brian Peek
DIFFICULTY: Medium
TIME REQUIRED: 5 hours
COST: Windows—free; Xbox 360—cost of hardware, plus $99/year for XNA Creators Club membership (note that there are ways to get this for free, such as DreamSpark for student developers); Zune—cost of Zune device
SOFTWARE: Visual C# 2008 Express or any full edition of Visual Studio 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.0
HARDWARE: Xbox 360 version requires an Xbox 360 with a hard drive; Zune version requires a Zune device
DOWNLOAD: http://www.c4fbook.com/AlienAttack
With the release of XNA Game Studio, Microsoft has brought homebrew game development to a new level. XNA provides an easy-to-use framework for developing games, and allows those games to be distributed and run not only on a PC, but also on the Xbox 360 and Zune. Additionally, because of a common framework and common development language, XNA provides for an almost perfect"write once and run everywhere" scenario. The code used for the Windows version will, in almost every case, compile and run on the Xbox 360 and Zune with few to no changes.
Overview
In this chapter, we walk through creating a very simple two-dimensional game using the XNA Framework that will run on a PC, Xbox 360, and Zune. We will discuss the concepts of 2-D graphics, sound, user input, and simple artificial intelligence (AI) while writing a clone of the arcade classic Space Invaders called Alien Attack, as shown in Figure 1-1.
Figure 1-1. Alien Attack
As you build this game, keep in mind ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.