The beginnings

I had already picked my papers for 2008, first semester (at MIT). One of the lecturers (Mike Lopez) ah.. 'strongly encouraged' me to switch a paper and enrol in the newly offered paper Games Design Level 6. I wasn't to hard to persuade as it sounded far more interesting than Quality Assurance!

XNA 2.0 had been released only a few months before hand so it was certainly a cutting edge paper. We didn't have a text book as there weren't a lot available. The lecturer had spent his summer studying XNA and putting together a series of modules for us to work through.

The first series (2D) covered:

• Input Management
• Audio Management
• Menus messages and data entry
• Sprites, 2D camera and scrolling backgrounds

Second series (3D) covered:

• Introduction to 3D worlds
• The content pipeline
• 3D models and animation
• Movement and collision detection
• Terrain maps and skydomes

The basic idea was that over the duration of the paper we would each build up the basics of a game engine. The idea of “do it once, do it right, so then you can forget about it” was stressed over and over. Because of this, we ended up creating a lot of Manager classes.

Mentioning Classes.. For anyone considering doing XNA (or any games) programming, I can't stress enough the benefit of Object Oriented methodology!

Next few posts will cover more of my XNA experience over the last year. Hopefully I will be able to share some of what I've learnt.

G