Xnapoolintro

This tutorial with take you through the first few steps of producing a simple pool game. The screenshot below gives you an idea of what can be accomplished using XNA in just a few hours of playing around, but don’t worry if you find you’re investing more of your time.

We’ll port the best ones onto the Xbox 360s and get them uploaded to the Creators Club.

This game project is completely your responsibility – obviously you’d do this work without me assessing it – but just in case there will a deliverable at the end of the exam period.

Note: Some of the approaches described in this tutorial are not accurate physical models of a pool simulation. We will be taking some short-cuts in order to get something fun up and running in as short a time as possible. Later on you may wish to refine the physical simulation behind the game.

For some of you - this will be dropping you in the deep end. However, we know the standard that you need to be at this stage in the degree and we can’t lower this (or no-one would get jobs). Do not worry too much – there will be plenty of support from the tutors and from other students.

Throughout this project, remember to take small iterative steps:
• Add a few lines of code
• Test that they compile
• Run your game to make sure they do as expected
• Step through the code using the incredible interactive debugger included as part of Visual Studio

If you’re not feeling confident enough to approach this straight away try completing some of the example exercises that come installed as part of XNA.

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