Back Cover

Back Cover

You haven't experienced the full potential of Xbox 360 or Windows until you've created your own homebrewed games for these innovative systems. With Microsoft's new XNA Framework, the only thing limiting you is your imagination. Now professional game developer and Microsoft DirectX MVP Benjamin Nitschke shows you how to take advantage of the XNA Game Studio Express tools and libraries in order to build cutting-edge games.

Whether you want to explore new worlds or speed down a city block in a souped up dragster, this book will get you up and running quickly. You'll learn how to implement 3D models, generate huge landscapes, map cool-looking shaders to your 3D objects, and much more. Nitschke also steps you through the development of your first fully functional racing game. You'll then be able to apply this information as you write your own XNA cross-platform games.

What you will learn from this book

• Tricks for managing the game engine and user interface
• How to program an old school shooter game and space adventure
• Tips for improving racing game logic and expanding your game ideas
• Methods for integrating amazing visual effects using advanced shader techniques
• Steps for adding sound and music with XACT-bringing your game to life
• How to fine-tune and debug your game for optimal performance

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to write their own games for the Xbox 360 or Windows platforms. You should have some experience coding with C# or a similar .NET language.

About the Author

Benjamin Nitschke is the founder, lead programmer, and game designer at exDream entertainment. He is 26 years old, lives in Hannover, Germany, and also became a DirectX MVP of Microsoft in 2006 for his outstanding work in the DirectX community, especially with the free game Rocket Commander.

He started young-at the age of 9 he bought his first computer, a C64. He did not have many games, but he was very eager to type in commands on the C64, and from that to writing the first applications and games in Basic was not a big step. A few years later he finally got a PC (386) and started some small game projects (Tetris clones, shoot-em-up games, and so on). exDream entertainment was founded 10 years ago, and they released a couple of smaller games until the first RTS game Arena Wars was created. Arena Wars was the first commercial .NET game ever and was released in 2004, where it received more than 20 awards worldwide, especially for the great multiplayer modes.

Recently Benjamin has developed a couple of free open source games like Rocket Commander and the XNA Racing Game Starter Kit and many game modifications for these games. These games feature many video tutorials and a good documentation and code style to help beginners create their first video games. The video tutorials were watched more than 100,000 times and the games were downloaded and played even more often than that.