Chapter 8. Gemstone Hunter - Put on your Platform Shoes

In the Gemstone Hunter game, the player is a treasure-hunting archaeologist roaming the zombie-infested wilderness. 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, such as 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 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, for a couple of reasons. First, all of the code in the Starter Kit is in C#, and second...