Building your first game

XNA attempts to simplify many of the basic elements of game development by automatically handling things, such as the game update loop and presenting the current frame of graphical information to the display. To illustrate just how much of the background work is integrated into the XNA project templates, let's jump in straight away and create your first game within a few minutes of finishing the installation.

Tip

Visual Basic versus C# - tutorials and samples on the web

With a five-year headstart on Visual Basic developers, there are a host of XNA tutorials, code samples, and forum posts written for C# out on the Internet. In the interest of being able to utilize these resources, I will occasionally point out topics or sections of code and their equivalent in C# notation.

In SquareChase, we will generate randomly positioned squares of different colors while the user attempts to catch them with their mouse pointer before they disappear. While building the project, we will discuss each of the major code sections pre-defined by the XNA templates.