Creating Video Games From Scratch Sky Con

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Creating Video Games from Scratch Martha Rotter martharo@microsoft.com

Why Games? Why Now? ● Developing Games is Hot! Whether it’s casual games, XBox360 games, PC games, adver- ● gaming, people are interacting with games more now than ever. ● Developing Games Makes Money! Just a few years ago, the games industry overtook the film ● industry: now the games make more than the movies. ● Developing Games is Fun! Duh! ● ● Developing Games is Free! Tools for XNA are all free, the only thing you might need to pay for ● is the Creators Club membership. 8

How Did This Happen? 10

What About Games…? 11

What are Community Games? XBox LIVE Community Games is a new gaming service that is complementary to XBox LIVE Arcade.  Launching this holiday season for the UK! Provides consumers with the best and broadest selection of gaming content available on ANY console. Xbox 360 is the first platform to democratize game development by allowing developers to distribute their games to more than 12 million Xbox LIVE members and offering them the opportunity to benefit financially from their creations. 12

How does Community Games Work? • The setup? Simple. • The payments? Cash. • As a Premium member of the XNA Creators Club, you can submit any game you’ve created. • Other Premium members can check your game to make sure it’s safe to play. • If it is, you’ll set a price point, between 200-800 points, for people to pay to download your game. 13

How you make money with Community Games • Once the game is reviewed and the price is set, you’re finished. • The game is now available on the XBox LIVE Marketplace. • You get a cheque every quarter for up to 70% of the game’s total depending on your own currency. • Depending on your game’s success, you may even have your game advertised on XBox360 and other Microsoft online properties! 14

Want an Example? • The latest example: Jonathan Blow, developer of the game Braid, an XBox360 game that's somewhat similar to early 'Mario' games for Nintendo. His game had only been on sale for a week, but he estimated it had already sold 55,000 copies for the Xbox360. At $15 per game, that’s $825,000 in first week gross sales. 15

XNA Overview Let’s learn some XNA basics: ● What is XNA? • “XNA’s Not Acronymed” • Unified platform for game development • Runs on XP, Vista – Sits on DX • Targets PC or Xbox 360 or Zune • Most boilerplate engine code already included • FREE! 16

XNA Overview What can you make with XNA? ● Some ideas: • 3D or 2D games • First person shooters • Real-time strategy games • And more! 17

What Else Can You Do With XNA? •Topics •Programs Create games Secondary & Post-Secondary Computer Science Game design Fine Arts Multi-threaded / Multi-core Computer Graphics Physics simulations Inter/multi-discipline Mathematics Research Visualization Senior projects / Capstone Networking Outreach programs AI Team projects

Some Assumptions Are there any prerequisite skills I need to have before I get started with XNA? ● Math skills • A basic understanding of 2D and 3D coordinate systems • Data structures, such as vectors and matrices ● Programming skills • Familiarity with the .NET platform and the C# language 19

XNA Game Studio Content XNA Visual Studio Device 2008 Management Pipeline Game Studio Application Model Content Pipeline XNA Graphics Audio Math Framework Gamer Input Networking Services Windows Xbox 360 Zune Platform

Game Flow Load Start Content Update Draw Unload End Content

XNA Framework Overview •Games •Starter Kits Code Content Components •Extended •Application Model •Content Pipeline •Framework •Core •Graphics •Audio •Input •Math •Storage •Framework •Direct3D •XContent •Platform •XACT •XINPUT 22

Custom Hardware • 3.2 GHz triple-core custom CPU • 500 MHz custom GPU • 512 MB unified memory • 12X dual-layer DVD drive • 20 GB removable hard drive • USB 2.0 ports • 10/100 Mbps Ethernet • IR receiver • Wireless peripheral support • High definition video out

Hardware Overview I/O CPU DVD (SATA) Chip HDD port (SATA) Core0 Core1 Core2 Front controllers (2 US L1D L1I L1D L1I L1D L1I Wireless controllers 1MB L2 SMCXMA Decoder MU ports (2 USB) Rear Panel USB Memory GPU Ethernet MC1 BIU/IO Intf IR 512 MB Audio Out FLASH DRAM 3D Core System control MC0 Video 10MB EDRAM Analog Out Video Out Chip

Assets ● Graphics • Models • Textures • Animations • Audio • Ambient sound • Music • Event sounds (explosions, speech, game over…) 25

Creating Assets ● Graphics • DCC (Digital Content Creation) tools • Maya, 3DS Max, Lightwave, Photoshop etc. • XNA provides importers for .x, .fbx and other file formats that can be produced by most DCC tools • Audio • MP3 & WAV sounds produced in traditional ways • Foley is the process of creating sound effects 26

The Content Pipeline ● Allows separation of artist and developer work ● Reduces engine / DCC format interdependencies • Many standard importers and processers are available for your content • Importers put your DCC content into the game, processors deal with it in the game • Extensibility: You can write your own importer for a custom file format ● Simple interaction from game to pipeline • ContentManager.Load(…) 27

The Content Pipeline Lifetime of an example asset: 1. Artist creates an oak tree in Maya 2. (Optionally) Animator adds an animation of the oak tree exploding violently 3. Developer receives this file in Maya format and imports it into the content pipeline 4. Compiler packs asset into a binary format tightly coupled with XNA (not designed for use elsewhere) 5. At runtime: The content pipeline processes the exploding tree 28

Let’s Get Started! Prepare your development environment. ● Not much is required to get started! • Windows XP or Vista • Visual C# Express • Install XNA game studio! 29

Which Version Should I Install? • Game Studio 2: • Works with Visual Studio 2005 & Visual C# 2005 Express Edition • Can deploy to Windows XP, Vista or XBox360 now • Game Studio 3: • Works with Visual Studio 2008 & Visual C# 2008 Express Edition • Can deploy to XP, Vista, Xbox 360 or Zune 30

What’s New in GS 3? • Xbox 360 • Xbox 360 project templates (You will not be able to develop on the Xbox 360 until our final release. We felt this was important to include so that you could get projects converted over and look at the system, even if you are not able to run the games, yet). • Support for the Big Button Pad. 31

What’s New in GS 3 (cont.)? • Framework & Visual Studio Features • Enumerate and play back media on your Windows computer or Xbox 360. • Simple sound effect support on Windows computers and Xbox 360. • Support for Rich Presence (lets friends know what’s going on in your game). • Support for Invites (ask your friends to join you in a multiplayer game) and Join Session In Progress (after you see what your friends are doing, you can join their current session with just a couple of button presses, even if that’s a different game to the one you are currently playing) 32

What’s New in GS 3 (cont.)? • More Framework & Visual Studio Features your content and save space with the new content Compress • compression features! • ClickOnce packaging support for distributing your XNA Framework games on Windows. • Upgrade your project from XNA Game Studio 2.0 using the Project Upgrade Wizard! • Take screen captures of your game running on Zune through the XNA Game Studio Device Center. • Support for .NET language features like Linq • Create multiple content projects and leverage cross project synchronization in Visual Studio. • FBX importer improvements: read materials containing multiple textures, and export custom shader materials directly out of Max or Maya. 33

Full mini-game Starter Kits Can be final destination or starting point Growing library of genres over time Focus on several key educational topics per Starter Kit 34

The Structure of an XNA Game How does the game run? ● Initialization • Load assets and set initial values ● Game Loop • Fixed number of frames per second • Frame: an individual stage of the game’s animation • In each frame, look for KB input, update world, run AI, etc. • Disposal of objects / Cleanup 35

Important Methods In your Game’s class file: ● LoadGraphicsContent • Pushes assets into the content pipeline ● Update • Realtime processing happens here • Updates to world data • In each frame, look for KB input, update world, run AI, etc. • Draw • Redraw scene 36

Accepting Keyboard Input Polling the keyboard is easy. ● Poll the keyboard as part of the Update process ● XNA exposes a list of pressed keys ● Check those key presses and handle them accordingly 37

Collision Detection Collision detection is easier than before. ● Like other processing, happens in the Update method ● Use a BoundingBox object. • Normally used for 3D meshes, just set Z to 0 • Create a BoundingBox for every object you want to detect collisions between • Use the BoundingBox.Intersects method to determine if 2 objects collide. 38

Summary ● About XNA – what it is, and architecture ● Assets & the content pipeline ● Anatomy of a game ● Creating and moving 2D sprites ● The game loop ● Simple collision detection 40

Q&A and Resources Some XNA Resources ● http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/XNA Official XNA Website ● http://creators.xna.com/Education/Tutorials.aspx Official Creators Club tutorials ● http://www.xnadevelopment.com Third-party XNA tutorials ● http://www.learnxna.com Third party XNA video tutorials ● http://blogs.msdn.com/martharotter My Blog 41

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Creating Video Games From Scratch Sky Con

by Martha Rotter on Feb 15, 2009

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Creating Video Games From Scratch Sky Con — Presentation Transcript

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