www.enchantedage.com

This is a simple game that uses the "HighscoreComponent" to manage a highscore list. It stores the list both locally, and uses Xbox Live! sessions to exchante highscore information with other players who happen to be playing the game at the same time. This way, high scores from people who are not your local players will show up, which is all kinds of cool :-)

When developing for XNA Game Studio, you have to map various game actions to various buttons on the game pad controller. Here is a list of what most games do -- if you follow this list, gamers won't be too surprised and will easily pick up your controls:

The standards that are "iron clad" and pretty much have to be followed are:

The Xbox has a special threading architecture. It has six hardware threads, spread over three hardware cores.

After working on the 3D game Ko-Ado the Cloud for the Dream-Build-Play competition, I decided to relax with a simpler, 2D-based game. And what better genre to start out with than the real-time strategy game?

A structure that I find works very well when managing entities in games is the world/entity/component pattern. Entities in the world are nothing more than collections of components, where the components have the responsibility to "do something" with the entity.

Sometimes, you hear statements like "an Xbox has nnn % of the performance of a Windows PC" where nnn will vary from 25 to 600 or so, depending on context. However, I disagree with any such statement -- you simply can't make that statement without being a whole lot more specific about what you are trying to measure.

You first need to understand how performance on CPUs actually work.

Sometimes, you hear statements like "an Xbox has nnn % of the performance of a Windows PC" where nnn will vary from 25 to 600 or so, depending on context. However, I disagree with any such statement -- you simply can't make that statement without being a whole lot more specific about what you are trying to measure.

You first need to understand how performance on CPUs actually work.

This post includes a thread pool class for the XNA Framework that works better on the Xbox than the thread pool class in the Compact CLR. The main thread can choose to get notified about task completion with a callback function, or by waiting on a pre-allocated wait handle, or do fire-and-forget on the thread tasks.

A particle system is something which can be used to make smoke, explosions, contrails, steam, and other kinds of "cloudy" or "sparkly" effects.

In most games, you'll need to know where everything is.