November 28
Getting Started
Welcome. Game development is near and dear to my heart since that is how I first learned to write software in the early 80's. Game programming and programming in general have come a long way since then. I hope that I can inspire others to learn to program by developing their own games and that I can give some assistance to you along the way.
On December 11, 2006 Microsoft released XNA Game Studio Express 1.0.
XNA Game Studio Express (from now on I'll write it as XNA GSE or just GSE) is an exciting new offering from Microsoft. It allows developers to create fully functional Windows XP (and soon Xbox 360) games using the latest and greatest development environment available.
XNA GSE requires Windows XP Service Pack 2.
First, download and install Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express. You can find it at this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualcsharp/
Once that's installed, you can download and install XNA GSE Beta from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/XNA/gse/
Optionally you can download and install the DirectX Software Development Kit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C72D9F1E-53F3-4747-8490-6801D8E8B4EF&displaylang=en which isn't required, but can give you some useful utilities for dealing with 3D models. It is, however, pretty large (500MB or so) so if you don't have the disk space, you can get by without it.
You should now have a new program group in your start menu, titled "Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express" and a corresponding shortcut under there named, appropriately, "Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express". Launch the program.
Select File->New Project. You should see a list of installed templates. Select Windows Game (XNA). In the Text Box at the bottom of the dialog, enter the name of your game. Let's call it MyFirstGame. Click OK. This will generate a project and create the base code for the game. It is actually a working application, but it doesn't do very much. If you click the green "Play" button in the top toolbar you can see what it does. It should look something like this:
Congratulations, you have created your first working program! Next time we'll start to make it do something.
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