Nikola Mihaylov, a Software Design Engineer in Test at Microsoft working on the WPF/Silverlight tools for Visual Studio, just published a document called “Anatomy of a Silverlight Game” on how to create games in Silverlight.

Here is how Nikola describes why he created it:

“Last week I created a document that incorporates my experiences developing the Shock Silverlight online game so far.

The document discusses the basics of online games in Silverlight and has a lot of practical examples (code) and a working project that you can use to build your own game.

Don't make the mistakes I did! Happy coding!”

In the document Nikola describe his experience in developing the Shock game and he also shares (for personal use only) the game source code.

Here is the document’s table of content:

Chapters 1 and 2: What makes up a Silverlight game?

Chapter 3 – Screen Layout: Laying out game elements to allow easy update to the UI, reduce XAML and code-behind clutter and have fewer bugs.

Chapter 4 – Game Internals: Discusses the typical classes that make up a game, how to make use of mouse and keyboard in code, how to support full screen, add transitions, and produce sound.

Chapter 5 – Networking: In this chapter you will learn how to setup a network connection to retrieve highscore list from a server, and some techniques to make your game load fast and look smooth. There is a short Chat and Multiplayer section that I intend to expand in the next release of this writing.

Chapter 6 – Host Integration discusses one important piece of an online game – interaction with the host browser.

Chapter 7 – Tips and Tricks describes some methods that you can use to increase traffic to your game, enhance game play, or just make your game look better.

I think this is a terrific effort and encourage anyone interested in Silverlight and games to do and download it!

To download it just go to Nikola’s blog post:
Anatomy of a Silverlight Game: Avoid Common Mistakes When Building Online Games