This week, we’ll be using the accelerometer to move the player around. For those of you without a device, this one is going to be a bit tricky, as the emulator has no support for the accelerometer at this time. To do this, we’ll put in a check to see whether we are running on a device or an emulator...

This week, we’ve got a good base for the TriangleShooter game. It shoots, scores, persists high score, has audio, it really gives you something to work off of. To make it easier to work from, this time around, we’re going to tweak a few things and refactor the source to be more readable and modifiable...

This week, we’re going to liven the game up a bit by adding sound effects. While I am pretty amazing at drawing triangles and other figures that you can create without any artistic skills, I have even less skills making sounds. Luckily, there are some places we can get some free sounds to use in our...

Last week, we added scoring, and keeping track of the high score over a set of games. The problem is, when you exit the game for any reason, you lose your high score. That’s because everything is unloaded from memory, so when you start your game over, it has nothing to start from. This week, we’ll save...

Time to add scoring! To add a competitive edge to the game, let’s add in a running total of how many enemies you’ve shot. We’ll also keep track of the high score across games so you can try to beat your last score. To do this, we’ll make use of a Sprite Font. A Sprite Font is a font specially prepared...

This time around, we’ll be doing a bit of refactoring to make the code easier to deal with, and adding in some death behavior. To begin with, we’ll need to start with the code from last week, so go ahead and pick that up from the SkyDrive share . To begin with, let’s update the Initialize...

Let’s make TriangleShooter a better game. This time around, we’ll be putting the shooter in TriangleShooter, by adding in the ability for the player to shoot. We’ll be starting with last week’s code, so you can go over and grab that from my SkyDrive share . I tried a few different ways of making the...

Time for my favorite part of Monday – Another article improving my TriangleShooter game! Last week, I promised you that I would spawn some more enemies, and that I would add in some other enemy types to make it more visually appealing. The great news is, both of those things are pretty easy. We’ll get...

Another week, another article bringing us one step further in the creation of TriangleShooter. Last week, we did a bit of refactoring and broke Player and Enemy out into classes. At the time, this didn’t change anything in how the application worked, but this week, we’ll take advantage of it by adding...

This week, I’m going to go over how to break out Player and Enemy into classes, which will make it easier to handle multiple enemies, collision, AI, that sort of thing. We’ll be starting things off with the project from last week, so you can go grab that now . If you take a look at how we’ve been doing...

Continuing from last week, in this article I’ll be walking through some basic collision. Again, I’ll be starting with the code base from last week, so you can go and grab that over at my SkyDrive share . To get started, we’ll need something to collide with. I’ve created some enemies for use with the...

Continuing on last week’s article, this week I’ll be showing you an updated way of handling movement using multi-touch. I’ll be starting with the code base from last week, so you can go ahead and get started by downloading that from my SkyDrive share . At the end of last week, we had a triangle that...

Welcome to the second post in the series building TriangleShooter. In this post, I will be going over drawing a sprite to the screen, then moving it around using multi-touch. In the last post, I described what you got from File –> New Project, so we didn’t have any code as such as our starting point...

When you start with a new project in XNA, you get some starter code templated out to begin writing your game. In this article, I’m going to walk through what you get. I will be using Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, and creating a Windows Phone Game project type. This article is the first...