Professional XNA™ Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360™ and Windows® with XNA Game Studio 2.0, Second Edition

Chapter 5. Writing Your Own XNA Graphics Engine

In the first section of this book you learned all about the XNA Framework and rendering 2D graphics with the help of the SpriteBatch class. You also made some fun games. Now it is time to explore the much more exciting world of 3D graphic programming. Creating 3D games is a lot more work than just putting together a 2D game, but many games would not be possible without the great advances in 3D graphics technology. Some games such as strategy games are also possible in 2D, and the most successful strategy games of all time (StarCraft, WarCraft, Command & Conquer, Age of Empires) show that 2D games are still very popular. But if you take a look at shooter games, they would just not be possible without 3D graphics, and the better and more realistic the graphics get, the more fun the games often are. Other game genres such as beat-'em-ups, adventures, sport games, and so on have also benefited from the advancements in recent years. Sure, Pong and the early tennis games were a lot of fun 10 or 20 years ago, but they don't compare in any way with today's sport games.

XNA is a great framework for quickly creating 2D games. Even without a team of people behind you, you will probably be able to quickly throw together a game idea, make some graphics, or find someone to make some graphics for your game, and then program the whole game in a matter of weeks or months.

However, most game programmers are much more excited about creating 3D games, and ...