Preface

Welcome to the world of mobile game development. By purchasing this book, you've made the first step towards building your first game for the Windows Phone platform.

In this book, we will first go over the technical stuff, like installing the tools, drawing 2D and 3D images, and end up building a 3D game for Windows Phone 7 together! Let's get started!

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started, is an introductory chapter where we define how we can build games for Windows Phone, install the necessary tools, and create our first project.

Chapter 2, 2D Graphics, covers drawing 2D images to the screen, moving them, and playing animations. We will also start creating a basic framework for our future game here.

Chapter 3, 3D Graphics, gives us more information about drawing 3D models, along with playing animations. The chapter also covers the concept of World, View, and Projection, and the concept of a camera.

Chapter 4, Input, will help us to add player interaction to our game, covering touch input, keyboard, and the accelerometer.

Chapter 5, Sound, will help us set the mood for our game. In this chapter, we will learn how to play sounds and apply effects to them, play 3D sound, and play songs.

Chapter 6, Building a Basic Framework, teaches us how to finalize our framework, so we are ready for building our game. This chapter introduces the concepts of a scene graph, a scene manager, and collision detection. It also shows us how to build menus.

Chapter 7, Building a Game, is the chapter where we build a game from scratch!

Chapter 8, Releasing our Game, gives us information on what to do after we finish our game. It gives information on how to release the game to the Windows Phone Marketplace and the certification process.

What you need for this book

Beside a healthy interest in building games, this book expects that you have knowledge about C# and some basic knowledge about math. Besides that, the book explains everything from the ground up.

You also need a computer with Windows Vista or newer (all editions except Starter Edition), 4 GB of free disk space, 3 GB RAM, and a DirectX10 or above capable graphics card.

Who this book is for

In this mini book, we won't have time to cover everything, so we assume you already have some experience with object-oriented programming. This book will cover the basics of building a game for Windows Phone, but we won't explain the C# programming language itself, nor object-oriented programming.

We will however explain the aspects of game development thoroughly, so don't worry if you have never written a (3D) game. We will cover all the basics here, including the much dreaded math. However, don't expect to write triple-A games, when you've finished this book, but you'll be off in the world of indie game development.

This is the right book for anyone, regardless of age and gender, if:

• You are interested in game development

• You want to start building games for Windows Phone

• You have some programming knowledge

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

public class RenderContext
{
    public SpriteBatch SpriteBatch { get; set; }
    public GraphicsDevice GraphicsDevice { get; set; }
    public GameTime GameTime { get; set; }
}

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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