Re: Game development learning

07-10-2009 6:20 AM |

 Unfortunatly there is next to nothing about it :(, there are a few decent sites dotted around the net that have bits and bobs but unless you have a clear idea of what you want to make and know how to use Silverlight you will hit LOTS of problems... I think Bill (who posts here frequently) has a game dev site for SL.

If you are new to game development i would recommend looking at XNA and making a few simple things in that to get your head rond C# and the main sort of things you need to know about making games. Once you have done that then look at making a few REALLY simple and small things in silverlight and get your head round how everything is Asynchronous and the way you have to put things into the scene rather than rendering to a backbuffer.

Then look into making a game of some kind, if you have any specific game related questions then pop them down but as far as A to B of game development in silverlight you are out of luck... although saying that im sure someone has released a book or is releasing a book on it at the moment...

Re: Game development learning

07-10-2009 3:15 PM |

Take look at the Welcome message - http://silverlight.net/forums/t/78493.aspx - It has few pointers on game development on Silverlight.

For me Silverlight looks like a good platform to develop games in. Especially now with Silverlight 3 games should be able to make use of the improved graphics performance.

How easy is it? If you are familiar with .NET/C# it should be pretty easy to pick up Silverlight programming.

 

Re: Game development learning

07-10-2009 4:59 PM |

Hi,

try this: http://www.amazon.com/Game-Programming-Silverlight-Michael-Snow/dp/1598639064/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247259519&sr=8-1

Re: Game development learning

07-10-2009 7:52 PM |

"Is it hard to do nice games?"

The answer to this question depends on many things, but the most important is: how good are your coding skills.

The first game I wrote in Silverlight is a retailored clone of the Amiga classic game E-Motion. This game is still on the shelf, unpublished. The major problem of this game is collision detection and handling. The speed of this game makes the standard ball-to-ball collision algorithm you can find on the internet inadequate.

My second game was Tilez, which is in the Silverlight showcase. This is a retailored clone of a German game I once bought on a C64 disk magazine. The game was never popular with my friends, but I liked it and it was very easy to develop.

Then I restarted working on my E-motion clone again, without progress. And my site needs content, so I created Mineral, which is a clone of the very old game (1982) Oil's Well. I think this game was written in about four weeks, in my spare time - I have a fulltime job.

The E-motion clone remains on the shelf. Currently I am creating a Wings of Fury clone in Silverlight. I think I've been doing this for about two months now - in my spare time. The basic things works now. Currently I am at my biggest challenge for this game, creating artificial intelligence for enemy planes. I've bought some books to help me with this. If I decide I can't do the AI (now), there still is a game, it only needs some levels. My WOF clone was not very hard to create up until now, it was just a lot of work.