Oct 302013
 

I am usually not a pc gaming person nor I am into vb.net langage (thus I used to teach it years ago).
Still, lately I could see my 2 kids writing games in VB.net.
And of course, as « Daddy » is a dev guy, he sure knows how to handle scrolling, sprites, pixel collision, etc.

Well it happens not (at all!) 🙂

Hence me looking closer at this platform, reading some nice things around XNA (a framework for dotnet) and deciding to give it a go.

I will therefore post in the coming days a serie of article illustrating some very basics that should beginners to start writing some tiny games.

First things first, you will need :
Visual Studio Express 2013 windows desktop edition (free)
the XNA assemblies (Game Studio 4)
Dotnet 4.x (will be installed with VS2013)
XNA runtime (needed also when youo distribute your executable).

Note that XNA is end of life (MS will drop support on April 2014).
However this is a good framework to practice and learn gaming tips and tricks.
Plus, there is a future is MonoGame : an open source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4.x Framework .

Regards,
Erwan