Speller – Our first XNA game
If you have never used XNA before, it would be helpful to review a number of concepts before you dive into 3D game design. In most 3D games, there will be at least some 2D content for user interfaces, Heads-up display (HUD) overlays, text alerts, and so on. In addition, many 3D game constructions are really evolutions of 2D game concepts.
In order to provide both an overview of the XNA game template and to build a foundation for moving forward into 3D development, we will construct a simple game called Speller. In Speller, the player controls a small square using the keyboard. During each round we will generate a random set of letters, including the letters needed to spell a particular word. The player's job is to navigate through the forest of letters and hit only the correct ones in the right order to spell the indicated word.
By building this game, we will be:
- Performing initialization when our game is executed
- Adding graphical assets to the game and loading them at run time
- Displaying 2D images with the
SpriteBatchclass - Drawing text to the screen with the
SpriteFontclass - Colorizing images and fonts
- Handling keyboard input and calculating player movement adjusted for the frame rate
- Bounding box collision detection
- Keeping and displaying the score
- Generating random numbers
That is quite a bit of ground to cover in a very small game, so we had better get started!