Chapter 8. Gemstone Hunter – Put on Your Platform Shoes
Gemstone Hunter places the player in the role of an adventuring, treasure hunting archeologist, roaming the wilderness collecting gemstones while avoiding zombies, skeletons, and mummies.
Unlike the other games presented in this book, Gemstone Hunter will not automatically generate levels. For this reason, the game can be viewed more along the lines of a project starter to explore topics like combining Windows Forms and XNA to produce a level editor, and an introduction to the basics of building a platform-style game.
The XNA Creator's Club website provides a number of "Starter Kits" that contain sample code and images to get you started on developing specific types of games. The Platform Starter Kit was introduced with XNA 3.1 and included in the XNA Game Studio distribution. We are going to make use of some of the graphics from this Starter Kit in Gemstone Hunter. We will not use the actual starter kit itself, however, as we want to...
