The best way to start creating your own games is simply to dive in and give it a go with this Beginner's Guide to XNA. Full of examples, tips, and tricks for a solid grounding. Overview Dive headfirst into game creation with XNA Four different styles of games comprising a puzzler, a space shooter, a multi-axis shoot 'em up, and a jump-and-run platformer Games that gradually increase in complexity to cover a wide variety of game development techniques Focuses entirely on developing games with the free version of XNA Packed with many suggestions for expanding your finished game that will make you think critically, technically, and creatively Fresh writing filled with many fun examples that introduce you to game programming concepts and implementation with XNA 4.0 A practical beginner's guide with a fast-paced but friendly and engaging approach towards game development What you will learn from this book Install the Microsoft XNA Framework and its required tools Build XNA Game projects and associated XNA Content projects Create a puzzle-style game exploring the concepts of game states, recursion, and 2D animation Add sound effects to your game with a "fire-and-forget" sound effects manager Create a particle system to generate random explosions Implement sound effects, collisions, and particle-based explosions by building a space shooter inside a chaotic asteroid field. Implement the A* path-finding algorithm to allow enemies to track down the player Generate tile-based maps and path-finding enemy tanks amidst a storm of bullets in a multi-axis shooter Combine XNA and Windows Forms to create a map editor for a multi-layered tile map engine Run, jump, and squash enemies in a side-scrolling platform using the maps from your editor Modify your creations for the Xbox 360 platform and deploy your games to the console Approach This book is a step-by-step tutorial that includes complete source code for all of the games covered