XNA na na
Today I broadened my programming schema with a games development workshop. The workshop was very brief, only lasting one short day, or long day when there’s travelling involved. I had an extremely early start at 5.50 (sense when was there a 5.50 in the morning? It was news to me too.). After struggling out of the house I headed down to the train station where I met Aaron and eventually Ciaran and Mike. We started are adventure at 6.46.
We confusedly got some trains to Coleraine University stop and even more obtrusively wondered the campus in search of the “South Building”. After a short pit stop in the students union we ended up circumnavigating the South Building until managing to find the actual entrance and an unlocked door. By this stage we had been drenched in an over exuberant volume of Coleraine’s weather. However, with Aaron about it’s hard to put any dampers on group morale.
In spite of the self indulged perplexity that our group of dysfunctionate individuals had inadvertently induced, we arrived with roughly two hours to burn. We twiddling our fingers for a bit, but ended up helping Darryl set up for the rest of the people coming and chatting to David & James.
Everyone was situated in the labs for around 10.30 and the workshop kicked off. There was an introduction to XNA Game Studio and simplistic only-what-you-need-to-know guide to general programming aimed at C# with XNA. We moved swiftly into some exercises designed to get us used to general workings of the Visual Studio extension. They really helped but could get frustrating if you couldn’t find a solution to your problem.
After a lunch break we started into the real tender meat of the day. There was small shooter games (think asteroids and space invaders) that we needed to modify. I started making modifications to the way the ships guns would fire, limiting the amount of bullets that could be used at once. The amount would increase when you destroyed more ships. Aaron, beside me, started into the tasks of taking the single player game and making it co-op. Semantically, it was a very ugly process involving copying most of the existing code and running it again for difference instances, but the output was brilliant.
As there was going to be a prize (a copy of Halo 3) for the best modification, and I thought Aaron’s was more outstanding that mine, I took what code I had already done and added it into his project. We both worked on his and together made it fairly decent. It got top three so they had a match on one of the games a student had made. Aaron won – somehow. That’s a copy of Halo 3 for the dude without an Xbox 360 (Oh dear).
That pretty much wrapped up the day. It was really educational, but more importantly the people holding the workshop were great fun to be around. I have to greatly extend my gratitude to the persons involved in the day.
