My First Games – XNA

I started making games sometime near the end of my second semester in college. This was just after we were taught OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) using C++, and it was only after understanding this concept that I was able to ‘think’ like a game dev. For example, I recognized that an enemy in a game is essentially the same as all the other enemies except that variables may be different…..same code – different behaviour. I realized that making a game might not be as hard as people make it out to be and that it was entirely possible for one person to do it. I decided that I was gonna make my own game for two primary reasons:

1. I was bored. I started programming when I started college (Fall 2013), so even the simplest of programs felt exciting to write. But as you could imagine after a whole semester of seeing a console window, with just words…and a plain solid color background, and the more-often-than-necessary beeping sound (it didn’t take long for my friends and I to find out how to change the colours lol), I got tired of it and wanted something more exciting.
2. My then-favourite game, War Commander (an MMORTS game), was going through some ‘changes’ that I didn’t really like, and with school in the mix, I just got frustrated with it and quit, rendering my life meaningless…

….so I decided to make my own game….after all…it’s still involves programming, so I wasn’t necessarily wasting time….and when the game is finished, I’d have something to play….so it’d be a win either way.

What I Used:

After I decided that project “Build-My-Own-Game-Because-Am-Not-Satisfied-With-Other-People’s-Games’ was a go….I did some research into the whole process of it…tbh tho…I didn’t do alot of reading, because at that point I hadn’t even heard of a game engine. Stupid.
I found that XNA Game Studio was a very popular framework for building games, and I got really hyped about it when I read that it was what developers used to make games for the XBOX (I started to picture all the AAA games)….I was really naive if that wasn’t already obvious.

So It began with XNA.

XNA, which runs on top of the .NET family….meant that I could use C#, which I was really happy about because I had just taught myself the language, re-doing my C++ assignments in C# as practice. Now I had something more interesting and challenging to do with the language.

After setting up the environment, I started to read that pdf book thingy that I got from the website and I caught onto the XNA’s API pretty quickly, using visual studio, meant that I also had intellisense which actually helped more than the book to be honest. Having that little snippet of documentation popping up for each class, method and/ attribute as I typed did wonders for me. I started at System.Object and read through most of the thingys, instead of reading the docs (it felt more meaning tbh and I had no internet at the time so online documentation wasn’t really an option)…

I ended up making two games using XNA, both in 2D for obvious reasons, a car game called ‘Formula Drift‘ and an infinte ‘runner’ called ‘Dodge Ball‘. Both were made for the windows phone, and I made a build of the car game too.

Unfortunatley, after unistalling the framework, and formatting my machine numerous times…..I somehow manged to currupt the .exe for the car game (it was an accident… -_-) so I can’t provide a link to download it. So instead…here are some screenshots that I took (fortunately…) when I was making them….the code was from the car game because I couldn’t find the in-game ones…the other stuff is from Dodge Ball, the infinite runner…

ohh, and yh, people did laugh at my art work……they still do…