XNA Game Studio Express

I tried XNA Game Studio Express when it was still in Beta, but at the weekend I thought I'd try the one that has actually been released. If you don't know what I'm talking about then I guess a quick introduction would be that XNA is a framework for creating games in .Net, and Game Studio Express is an addon to Visual C# Express that lets you create games.

It's all free, so go and download it if you want to try it.

So I went through the 2D tutorial, which teaches you how to display a sprite on the screen and get it moving. That was pretty easy to do, but you're not left with much of a game--more a screen saver of a picture bouncing around your screen.

I tried some of the additions described at the end of the article, and although it was pretty cool adding mouse support to throw the picture around, it still wasn't much of a game.

So I went onto the next tutorial, which was creating a 3D game. And talk about being thrown in at the deep end! The learning curve between the two examples is pretty steep, and I don't have the time to go through it to figure it all out.

So I've settled for a middle ground. I'm going to try and create a 1 player card game based on a game my parents taught me years ago. It's got quite simple rules, and will have simple graphics too, but at the end I hope to have an actual playable game.