Jason T Clark.net

Back from Labor Day weekend and now, I guess it’s time to do some more blogging. My last update was telling you guys that the Multiverse experiments are all “gone to November”, especially since the machine I was using to work on it was returned to work. And now that I’ve been putting my XBOX360 to good use, I’ve fallen upon the XNA Creator’s Club website, which shows us independents how we can leverage the XNA framework to create games for Windows, and compatible XBOX360 titles. Now be advised, the XNA framework won’t be used to create equivalent titles to Fallout 3 or Too Human, but it is a great way to develop somewhat content rich games for the XBOX360.

First things first, unless you have a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2005, you’ll need to download a copy of Visual Studio C# 2005 Express. It didn’t take that long for me, so in a matter of a few minutes, I was ready to go. Next download SP1 for it, then you can install the XNA Game Studio 2.0, which includes the XNA Framework, and a few project templates.

Now I’m up on C#- especially since it’s very very similar to Java. What I didn’t know was how to get things going using XNA. I must admit, the XNA website has lots of good tutorials and examples that will get you going quickly. The videos are especially good. What’s really nice is that once you understand how everything works, and how to use the project templates as a launching pad for you game projects, the rest is quite easy. I was able to even hook in one of my extra XBOX 360 controllers, and test out the my controller logic, making sure that my code was handling gamepad events properly. In subsequent posts, I will begin to flesh out a few examples to show just how XNA can be leveraged to create some really interesting applications.