Getting started with XNA

When I first started thinking about advancing my programming ability a few weeks ago, I really had nowhere to start. Reading the C# textbook for hours on end really felt like a battle of attrition, in comes the words, and out goes the knowledge, nothing stuck. Programming just isn’t something you can learn by reading someone else’s work. Of course there are the moments where you can gain valuable insight by seeing a snippet of somebody else’s code, but more often than not, the only real way to learn programming is to open up an IDE(Integrated Development Environment) and start coding away.

So there I was, filled with ambition and completely clueless. My first train of thought was “hmm okay, making games, let’s forget about gameplay for now, and start basic, draw a dot on the screen, and control it with arrow keys.” Of course that was a far cry from anything I had previously done in class. No matter how advanced my coursework got, it was always still just console applications. Feeling overwhelmed, I decided I would consult a friend of mine who was more experienced than I in this field. His interest in this was enough that rather than just giving me advice on this, he is now my partner for all future developments, all documented in this blog.

Though more experienced than I, working on something of this nature was still outside his field of expertise. When in doubt, hit the Google button. It’s a philosophy I follow almost religiously. After spending maybe 5 minutes on Google, I found the website that would allow me to get a foothold on game programming, http://www.xnadevelopment.com/. This blog has excellent tutorials starting from complete scratch and advancing all the way to what I considered at the time advanced programming techniques such as RTS style unit selection and a primitive manner of 2-D collision detection.

While running through these tutorials, you really feel as though you accomplished something. From only programming applications that run in the console, to seeing your little wizard guy shooting fireballs, is an amazing moment. The XNA framework takes care of a great amount of grunt work required to make a game. So the transition isn’t as bad as many would think.