Incredible, I’m still impressed. I was bored of the D+ demo I’m preparing currently and I thought I try to create a small gambling game. For those of you who know the Novoline gambling machines you exactly understand what I mean. Now because of the current progress of the D+ engine makes it impossible to use it for the UltraHot game I fired up my VS and started a XNA project. For those of you who follow this blog, you know that I prefer C++ for game development and that I have absolutely no experience in managed code for game programming. Although I’m familiar with C# due to the web and application development of my job I thought I’ll give it a try.
Again without any knowledge of XNA, without any experience in XNA game development I started my project and after a few minutes I felt very familiar with the the project. Now I needed some entry points to develop this game and I soon stepped over www.riemers.net who has some excellent XNA tutorials. With this I was able to create a basic framework within hours. Really. After some short time (I thought it was about 3-4 hours) I was finished with the complete rendering, input and audio stuff. I friend of mine created some great assets to use and so I’m now able to concentrate on the game logic and finish this game. Incredible. All that stuff you have to code yourself in C++ are wrapped up in this magic box called XNA. For fast results for small games I would absolutely recommend using XNA instead of C++. I don’t know if the performance is comparable but I don’t think so. C++ is most probably still faster than XNA but hey. I’m talking about a 2D game so who cares. I’ll know if I dive deeper into XNA….
