I came around one article about someone learning XNA in one day. His goal was to create a full game in one day even if he had never used XNA before… and even.. rarely even used C#. While I don’t think it’s a good thing to do (you will get more frustrated than anything), I guess it’s always good to compare someone else code to yours and think of how YOU would have done something.
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Well, the idea was to force me to actually create something. It only became XNA in a Day when I actually realised how easy it was to use XNA. The C# thing was less of an issue as I have extensive experience in C++ and VB.Net, so for the limited differences I did find it was negligible.
Personally, my greatest issue with my own previous development style was that I would over engineer everything. Sure, creating a clone without any planning isn’t for everybody, but this was about breaking through a development drought that had extended far too long already for me, as well as I learned quite a few good things while doing it.
In future I will be attempting to do other simple games within a day, but at least due to the “Breakout” experience they will never truly be “from scratch” again.
Things I learned:
* A SpriteManager class would be very useful (instead of relying on the Collision class)
* The Different Sprites should have their own Class Inherited from Sprite, so that Movement is not so Hacked
* Collisions should Callback to the Game class so that appropriate scoring need not be Hacked.
* Offscreening all the Block Sprites in one location really does make the Collision Detection System Work…. badly (as none of the Blocks ever move because of their collision, its a waste of resources)
* Collisions should only be checked on the Moving object, not all objects, so as to save some of those precious cycles.
This will be covered in the next article.
Thanks a lot for the explanation. Just to clear things up, I didn’t want to make you look silly for doing what you did. In fact, I found you really ambitious and I wanted to share that with my few readers.
Since I aim my blog mostly to newcomer in the XNA field, I didn’t them to think it was something they should have achieved too.
Good job with your challenge and thank you for clarifying your intentions and sharing with me and my few readers what you learned of your experience!
I will stay tuned to your next tutorial!
interesting article