Learning XNA 3.0

How This Book Is Organized

This book introduces XNA game development concepts while walking the reader through the development of three different XNA games. Although most of the material generally applies to developing games for any of the available platforms, Chapter 8 and Chapter 16 focus on developing games for the Zune and the Xbox 360, respectively.

The first portion of the book takes the reader through the development of a 2D game. Here are the chapters that compose this section:

Chapter 1

Walks you through a short introduction to XNA, the tools needed to develop games in XNA, and the installation of XNA Game Studio 3.0.

Chapter 2

Introduces 2D sprites, transparency, sort order, movement, framerates, sprite sheets, and animation.

Chapter 3

Covers user input from keyboards, mice, and Xbox 360 gamepads, as well as the implementation of collision detection.

Chapter 4

Discusses and implements game components and applies an object-oriented class hierarchy to the design of your game.

Chapter 5

Introduces the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), as well as the new simplified audio API as methods to add sound to your games on the PC, Xbox 360, and Zune.

Chapter 6

Explains the nature of the science of artificial intelligence and introduces basic artificial intelligence concepts; also walks through creating customized derived classes within your class hierarchy to implement different behaviors for your sprites.

Chapter 7

Puts the finishing touches on the 2D game, including 2D text, ...