Building the Game The Black Hole game is based on most of the code we’ve developed in each of the previous hours of the book, and there really is no single previous hour that gets more credit than others since each hour has built upon the hours that came before. Let’s dig into the game [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Windows Phone’
Rocket Science: Acceleration
November 8th, 2012 
Jason Bourne 
Posted in Game Programming 
Tags: Black Hole, FIGURE, Finite State Gameplay, Gameplay Source Code, GUI, LISTING, Sqrt Math, Stephen Hawking, Windows Phone 
No Comments »Treating Bitmaps as Sprites
October 21st, 2012 Jason Bourne Bringing Bitmaps to Life A sprite is a bitmap with benefits. XNA provides the SpriteBatch class to draw bitmaps with the SpriteBatch.Draw() method, of which there are several overloaded variants. But despite the name, SpriteBatch does not give us “sprite” capabilities from the gameplay perspective. SpriteBatch is a rendering class, used solely for drawing, not [...]
Posted in Game Programming Tags: Clear Color, Error Handling, FIGURE, Game1 Microsoft, LISTING, Simple Sprite Class, Sprite Class, Sprite Content, Windows Phone, XNA No Comments »Getting User Input
October 19th, 2012 Jason Bourne Exploring Windows Phone Touchscreen Input Programming a game’s input system really does require a lot of design consideration ahead of time because all we really can use is the touchscreen! Oh, there is an accelerometer that can be used for input, but it is a rare and often niche game that uses the accelerometer to [...]
Printing Text
October 18th, 2012 Jason Bourne Creating the Font Demo Project A font in XNA is nothing more than a text file—at least, from the programmer’s point of view. When the project is compiled, XNA uses the text file to create a bitmap font on a memory texture and use that for printing text on the screen. This is a time-consuming [...]
Posted in Game Programming Tags: Choose Sprite Font, FIGURE, Font Demo, New Item, Printing Text, Sprite Font, Visual Studio, Windows Phone, XML, XNA No Comments »Getting Started with Visual C# 2010 for Windows Phone
October 17th, 2012 Jason Bourne Visual C# 2010 Express At the time of this writing, the current version of the development tool for Windows Phone 7 is Visual Studio 2010. To make development simple for newcomers to the Windows Mobile platform, Microsoft has set up a package that will install everything you need to develop, compile, and run code in [...]
Making Games for Windows Phone 7
October 16th, 2012 Jason Bourne Getting Started with Windows Phone 7 There are two ways we can develop games for Windows Phone 7: Silverlight and XNA Game Studio. Although Silverlight does have basic graphics capabilities, those capabilities are provided to support applications and are not ideally suited for games. XNA, on the other hand, was developed specifically for game development! [...]
Posted in Game Programming Tags: FIGURE, Game Platform, Getting Started, Hardware Specifications, HP, Palm Pilot, PC, TABLE, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone No Comments »Windows Phone Performance Optimization, Fast! to Faster!
October 10th, 2012 Jason Bourne Optimizing your game’s performance Games belong to a class of real-time software. This means that they are not only expected to produce the correct result, but they must also complete this within a fixed time window. In general, game developers shoot for a minimum of displaying 30 frames per second in order to produce smooth, [...]
Posted in Windows Phone XNA Tags: CPU, DXT, GC, LINQ, MS, NET, Windows Phone, XAP, XML, XNA No Comments »Windows Phone Special Effects
October 8th, 2012 Jason Bourne Using dual texture effects Dual texture is very useful when you want to map two textures onto a model. The Windows Phone 7 XNA built-in DualTextureEffect samples the pixel color from two texture images. That is why it is called dual texture. The textures used in the effect have their own texture coordinate and can [...]
Windows Phone Embedding Audio in your Game
October 6th, 2012 Jason Bourne Controlling an audio file Music has the ability to impact the emotions of human beings. Different styles of music produce different feelings. Fast tempo music makes people feel nervous or excited; when the tempo becomes slow, people feel relaxed and safe. In modern video games, music often plays an important role in creating the atmosphere. [...]
Posted in Windows Phone XNA Tags: Counter Strike, Current Sound, Load Song, Song Name, Stereo Sound, Using Hold, Windows Phone, Windows Phone Game, XNA, XZ No Comments »Windows Phone Collision Detection #Part 2
October 3rd, 2012 Jason Bourne Mapping a tapped location to 3D To pick an object in a 3D game is relevant in terms of real-time strategy. For example, in StarCraft2, you can choose a construction from a 2D panel, then a semi-transparent 3D model will show up in the game view that lets you choose the best location for building [...]
Windows Phone Collision Detection #Part 1
October 3rd, 2012 Jason Bourne Detecting the intersection of line segments Basically, line segments’ intersection is a mathematical concept. To detect the intersection of two line segments, find their intersection points. For 2D games, it is very helpful when an explosion animation appears at a position where the two lines intersect; for example, two laser shoots collide. The line segments’ [...]
Windows Phone Entering the Exciting World of 3D Models #part2
September 29th, 2012 Jason Bourne Creating a terrain with texture mapping In most of the modern outdoor games, such as Delta Force and Crysis, you will see the trees, rivers, mountains, and so on, all of which are dedicated to simulating the real world, as the game developer hopes to bring a realistic environment when you are playing. In order [...]
Posted in Windows Phone XNA Tags: Bottom Face, CPU, Draw Matrix, Draw Ocean, Front Face, Left Face, Right Face, Windows Phone, Windows Phone Game, XNA 1 Comment »Windows Phone Entering the Exciting World of 3D Models #part1
September 29th, 2012 Jason Bourne Controlling a model with the help of trackball rotation To rotate a model from any direction in Windows Phone 7 could let the game player have extra choices to view the model. For programming, the trackball viewer will help the programmer to check whether the output model from the model software works well. In this [...]
Windwos Phone Content Processing
September 26th, 2012 Jason Bourne The architecture and flow of content processing Content processing is a special module in Windows Phone 7 Game Programming. It provides the flexibility for different types of game content including images, effects, and models. Besides this, the most powerful aspect of content processing is the extension to customize your game with different types of contents. [...]
Windows Phone Game User Interface, Heads Up Display (HUD) #Part 2
September 24th, 2012 Jason Bourne Creating a progress bar for game content loading and value status When playing a game, especially for some big games, at the initialization phase, a progress bar will show you the game object loading status and percents. As a time-based game, the progress bar represents the remaining time. Moreover, a Role Playing Game (RPG) often [...]
Posted in Windows Phone XNA Tags: GUI, List Rectangle, Rectangle Bound, RGB, Selection Area, Textbox Bound, Visual Studio, Windows Phone, Windows Phone Game, XNA No Comments »
