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The Project Setup (1.0)
In this tutorial we will cover the basics of starting a new game project and how to configure the game properties to suite the environment of our game. This tutorial is for absolute beginners. However, experienced programmers may comment and help others.
Skill Level: EasyTime to Complete: 10 Minutes
Special Links:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27599
#1.1 Selecting a Project Type
Their are two main types of game projects you can build. First being a Windows Game, second being an Xbox 360 Game. Windows Games can be distributed freely depending on the author of the game. Xbox 360 Games can be built and deployed on the Xbox 360 console. This requires a one hundred dollar annual license. Then your game must be submitted for peer review and pass. Once it has passed, it will be displayed in the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be using a Windows Game Project. Name the project what ever you want.
#1.2 What is where?
When your new Windows Game project has finished loading, you will be introduced to your games main control class. Within this class you will see a lot of comments (green text). Please read and fully understand them all. Once you have done so, remove it all. You should end up with a screen like this.
On the right hand side is our Solution Explorer. Here we can see our main project, and our Content Project. Our content project is a special project used to hold all of the games content and process it though using something called the content processor.
#1.3 Setting up the Graphics Processor
Now lets get our games window size setup. This size can be anything you want. If you are making an Xbox 360 game. You will want to set your back buffer width to 1280 and your back buffer height to 720.
For the purpose of this tutorial I will use the screen size of 880x520. I will also be setting the MultiSample option to true. This allows Anti-Alias to kick in for any object that is less then 1 pixel by position. So if my asset were at the position (100, 100), anti-alias would not kick in. However if my position was at (100, 100.5), anti-alias would kick in to smooth that edge.
Then finally we apply out changes. All of this code will be held under the Game1 constructor method.
#1.4 Unloading our Content
Now our last thing to prepare before we can start building our game is to unload our content. Our content (when loaded) is loaded in to memory. By unloading it, we remove it from memory. Then we dispose the content manager because we are ending the games process.
Thank you for reading and following along. If you have any questions please post below. Please watch out for the next parts in the series. Please note this tutorial is small as it is part of a series. This tutorial will just prepare the user for the start of the series.
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