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

Chapter 16. Role-Playing Games

This chapter covers role-playing games in general and then explains the concept of the Dungeon Quest game in detail. Not only are the concept and the ranking and leveling system explained, but we will also take a look at the available player characters and enemies in the game. The chapter ends with some general game logic unit tests and a little bit more about the UI, both in the menu and in game.

But before we get back to coding, let's first get into the game concept of Dungeon Quest. The very first version of Dungeon Quest was developed in just four days live at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) 2007, in March 2007. The game was part of a contest hosted by Microsoft called XNA Challenge, where four games were developed in four days by four teams directly in the GDC lobby with all the noise and distractions a big conference like the GDC brings with it. But each team managed to finish their game on time. Our team consisted of one programmer (me) and one artist (a friend of mine, Christoph Rienaecker).

The absolutely insane idea was to create a multiplayer role-playing game from scratch in these four days. While the multiplayer part was pretty hard to do on the Xbox 360 console (we tried split screen support, but it never made it into the game logic, just a unit test was written), the rest of the game went as we wanted. This version of Dungeon Quest (see Figure 16-1) featured a third-person view from behind like many current role-playing games, supported ...