Jonathan Harbour - Sams Teach Yourself Windows Phone 7 Game Programming in 24 Hours

800 East 96th Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46240 USA

Sams Teach Yourself Windows Phone 7 Game Programming in 24 Hours
Copyright 2012 by Sams Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33554-9
ISBN-10: 0-672-33554-9

Editor-in-Chief
Greg Wiegand

Executive Editor
Neil Rowe

Development Editor
Mark Renfrow

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Project Editor
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Copy Editor
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Ken Johnson

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Sarah Kearns

Technical Editor
Jim Perry

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Cindy Teeters

Book Designer
Gary Adair

Composition
Nonie Ratcliff

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Printed in the United States of America

First Printing November 2011

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Dedicated to FASA Corporation founders Jordan Weisman
and L. Ross Babcock III, whose games continue to inspire.

Jonathan S. Harbour has been programming video games since the 1980s. His first game system was an Atari 2600, which he played with, disassembled, on the floor of his room as a kid. He has written on numerous subjects such as C++, C#, Basic, Java, DirectX, Allegro, Lua, DarkBasic, Pocket PC, and game consoles. He is the author of another recent book titled XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Xbox 360 Developers. He holds a Masters degree in Information Systems Management. Visit his web log and game development forum at www.jharbour.com/forum, and his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/jharbourcom.

Thank you to the editorial staff at Sams for their hard work in getting this book polished and into print: Neil Rowe, Mark Renfrow, Andy Beaster, Cheri Clark, Ken Johnson, Sarah Kearns, Nonie Ratcliff, and a special thanks to Jim Perry for his technical advice. I enjoyed working with all of you and hope we can do it again soon.

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This book was written with the beginner in mind. Each of the 24 hours in this book is short and succinct, usually teaching one basic subject and building on previous hours. The subjects covered in this book are geared primarily toward rendering on the small Windows Phone 7 screen. A lot of attention is given to sprite animation, since this seems to be the main focus of games for this platform. This book is not a geeky or gadget guide to the Windows Phone 7 platform. There are no hours devoted to the Windows Phone 7 hardware capabilities, and there is no overview of available applications in the marketplace.

This book is entirely focused on programming games with XNA Game Studio 4.0, targeting the Windows Phone 7 platform, and gets to the point quickly. This book does not try to cover every aspect of programming with XNA Game Studio 4.0. The goal of this book is to teach a relative beginner how to get graphics on the screen of a phone device, how to get user input via the touchscreen, and how to interact with the user. A lot of attention is given to user input, animation, and interaction. This requires a significant investment of time into graphical user interface (GUI) programming, which features prominently in these pages.

Our development tool of choice is obvious: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone (with total emphasis on the C# language). This book does not spend much time covering Silverlight, although one small example of a Silverlight application is presented as a comparison to XNA. Nor is 3D rendering a high priority in this book. XNAs rendering capabilities are similar on all XNA platforms. Most of the same 3D rendering code will run on Windows, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 7 without modification. The real difference is that custom shader effects are not supported on Windows Phone 7. The first hour will help you get up and running with the development environment.

This book assumes that the reader is new to the Windows Phone 7 platform, and new to XNA Game Studio 4.0. It assumes that the reader has a basic working knowledge of the C# language, but moves at a reasonable pace. This book does go deep into some advanced concepts, such as animation and collision response, but this is not a heavy rendering book. This is far more of a