Evil Clutches ala XNA, My First XNA Game

Posted in: C#, Game Development | May 3rd, 2008

I was speaking with a co-worker last night, and we got into the topic of game development and XNA.  As usual, I took the topic and went a little overboard and decided to install XNA at home and ‘go at it’.  Since I recently finished the ‘Evil Clutches’ chapter from Game Makers’ Apprentice and, also released the ‘Evil Clutches Javascript‘ version; I decided to attempt making Evil Clutches in XNA.  It was a fairly straight forward process, and required almost no reading on my part.  I was able to install XNA, Launch Visual Studio 2005 and create a new project and just ‘begin’.

I was actually very impressed with how simple it was to build the game, so much so that I referred to it as ‘childs play’ to my co-worker just after finishing up the Alpha. With that said, here’s the basic process I went through;

  1. Step 1: Launch Visual Studio 2005 and create a new Windows Game
  2. Add my Art resources to the Games’ Content
  3. Create a GameObject base class to store common information (Position, Texture, Color, Collision Detection, etc).
  4. Create object classes for my Dragon, Boss, Fireball, Demon and Baby objects.
  5. Apply basic ‘render’ logic to the ‘Draw’ method of my Game class
  6. Apply basic ‘call object Update’ logic to my Update
  7. Create the necessary ‘Update’ methods on my object classes
  8. Revisit the Game’s Update method and apply basic Input logic (Escape to Exit, Up/Down to move Dragon, Space to Shoot)
  9. Add a SpriteFont and add logic to print the score on the screen
  10. Package it up and Write this blog post.

It really was that simple, and the entire process took me less then two hours.  Seriously, I banged the whole thing out just by looking up the ‘How To’ references on MSDN. Now, of course, as with everything in software development the ‘easy ten step process’ I listed above had lots of little ‘inbetweens’ (actual logic, etc).

You can download the 1.0.0.0-alpha release of my ‘Evil Clutches XNA‘.  If there’s an interest in XNA Game Development tutorials, then I might write up a ‘The Making of Evil Clutches for XNA’ post, so let me know in the comments if your interested in that sort of things.

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One Response to “Evil Clutches ala XNA, My First XNA Game”

  1. Hi Says:
    November 19th, 2008 at 9:14 am

    Hey would i be able to see your source code ?

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