Thursday, November 8, 2012

Adventures in XNA - New Visual Basic Game Programming Series

Greetings, humanoids!

I'm back - finally - and trying to get my new tutorial series "Adventures in XNA" off the ground. After playing with XNA a bit, and with a tremendous amount of help from Kalamus1, we've greatly refined the process of setting up an XNA game, movement and animation cycles, managing game screens, and much more.

You can follow the new series on YouTube!






Friday, August 10, 2012

Project 5 ~ XNA Sound and Music Class & Touch Trigger (sign post) ~ VB 2010 .NET



Work In Process - Project 5:
Rad Marvin takes a leisurely stroll through TinyWorld and finds a sign post whilst groovin' to some new tunes thanks to the addition of a new sound class.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Kalamus Project ~ XNA 4 on VB .NET - Fun with Particles!


He's done it again, folks! Kalamus1 is mastering XNA's particle engine! This is his first demonstration of particle effects. Regrettably, I'm recording at work and didn't get to capture the thunder claps that follow the flashes of lightning. Boo! Needless to say, it's awesome! :-D

Stay tuned - there's more to come!

Kalamus' Project ~ XNA 4 - Procedural Tile Map Generation, A* Pathfinding, & Selectable MiniMap


This in an awesome "Work In Process" that belongs to Kalamus.

So far he's added the following:
   - Procedural Tile Map Generation (On Key Press)
   - A* Path Finding
   - A Minimap interface that can navigate the world map
   - A debug menu
   - Dead Sexy, Animated Menus
   - Water animation cycle
   - Kalamus' Adaptation of Mango Screen Management
   - A clean, smooth class flow that I REALLY need to adopt...

I'm ever grateful and indebted for being given the opportunity to learn from this guy! :-D

Project 4 - XNA Toon Movement, Map Triggers for Map Loading ~ VB 2010 (.NET)

Work In Process - Project 4:
Rad Marvin rides again! I have added character movement, tile blocking, and map triggers to load new maps/teleport and reposition the toon.
I also have working sound (not featured in this video because I'm recording at work :-P ).

Project 3 - XNA Simple Title Screen and Animated Tile Map ~ VB 2010 (.NET)

XNA 4 - Visual Basic 2010 (.NET)
Work In Process - Project 3:
Today, I worked on setting up a very simple title screen and world map. When you press "ENTER", it then loads the world map, complete with basic water animation, and a welcome dialog using my Text Processor class from Project 1.

I'm using 16x16 tile textures drawn at 32x32 on a 512x448 (SNES format) screen.

I still have a bit of improving to do on my text processor. I want to create enumerated screen type templates to automatically choose the backdrop style and location.

After that, I need to reformat my battle processor to fit the screen more dynamically.

Project 2 - XNA Classic RPG Style Battle System ~ VB 2010 (.NET)

XNA 4 - Visual Basic 2010 (.NET)
Work In Process - Project 2:
I'm working on a simple *riiiiight* battle system that will be similar to the classic NES "Dragon Warrior". Naturally, I hope to add more glitz and glamor in the future. For now, I just want it to be functional. I'm presently displaying the creature stats just to show that their entity class is updating successfully.

~ NOTE ~
I will eventually be releasing tutorials and source code for these projects.

Project 1 - XNA Text Processor & Menu Classes ~ VB 2010 (.NET)


XNA 4 - Visual Basic 2010 (.NET)
Work In Process - Project 1:
I'm building a text processor class to handle game dialog.
It's large and sloppy but I wanted the "typing stream" effect instead of instant print.

~ NOTE ~
I will eventually be releasing tutorials and source code for these projects.