Posts Tagged Programming

Recently I decided to use my free time (hah!) to check out the XNA Game Studio. For those of you not aware, XNA is Microsoft’s outreach program to the homebrew/indie community.

The XNA community portal.

The Game Studio itself is a suite of tools that can be used to make games for Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune. It’s not quite the same as Xbox Live Arcade, but similar in scope. What really surprised me, though, were the XNA tutorial videos. There’s a whole bunch of them, and some even assume that you know nothing about programming.

So how much can you really get from ‘em? Well, the videos take you step by step through various programming concepts and conventions, but eventually you will need to learn how to program. Or at least get very good at tweaking others’ code.

Still, this is as good a start as any.

When I began to learn programming — always with the intention of making videogames — I was a bit overwhelmed. There were a lot of languages, all with their own libraries, and all dedicated to particular pieces of hardware. Also, they seemed to universally cater towards tasks that had nothing to do with what I wanted to learn.

Eventually, though, I decided not to worry too much about the starting point and just dive in. The semantics of programming languages and their APIs vary, but they carry over, and the concepts are 100% portable.

In general, software tends to resemble a clockwork mechanism; a sprawling contraption of numerous interconnected parts. The logic behind each part is never that difficult to grasp, but the whole picture can be a bit daunting. Tweak and slowly change around the parts, though, and you’ll start learning how the whole thing functions. The XNA tutorial videos encourage this, and even point out places where you might want to experiment and where you should go to learn more. There are also plenty of videogame specific tutorials, and some even include entire “construction kits” (small-scale game engines that contain numerous pieces of functionality).

Microsoft seems to have put in a great deal of effort into the XNA community, and it’s definitely worth checking out. And who knows, if you develop something for it, you might also end up selling it to millions of Xbox 360 owners.