Well the end of Term 1 has finally come around.  I thought it would be a good time to look back at how my Game Design class has progressed with C# and XNA…

The first few weeks of the term were tough.  I had written a few tutorials – translating some of the content from the MS XNA Beginner’s Tutorials here.  Students started working through these tutorials and some were rushing through them much quicker than I expected.  Others were getting stuck with understanding the structure of an XNA / C# program, variables and constructs, etc.  This was very difficult as I was also trying to get my head around these concepts at the same time as trying to stay one step ahead of those that were finishing the tutorials that I had produced.

The general level of understanding of students during this time was poor.  The learning curve was a steep one and students were getting very little rewards for their efforts.  Their programs were almost impossible to debug as they were not familiar enough with the language and the interface.  However, it didn’t take long for things to turn around.

Once students had worked through the tutorial (in fact in many cases, even before they had finished), they started modifying the code and producing their own versions of the game described.  I decided to set this as the first mini-project and from this point on students flourished.  Students were creating versions of the tutorial game that I had not envisioned and many were very creative.  Many were still developing these mini-projects at the end of term despite the fact that we had moved on in the theory from the tutorial to some specific skills. 

Just prior to the end of Term 1, I produced my own mini-game called ‘Fozzie’s Banana Flip’.

  Fozzie\'s Banana Flip

By building this project up, I was able to demonstrate a number of additional skills to students such as sound, animation using sprite maps, collision detection, keeping score and randomisation.

The work that students are doing is really great and they are genuienly disappointed when the bell rings at the end of each class.  My aim is to get them started on their major projects with a view to porting these on to an XBOX360 at the end of the semester for play-testing.  I also aim to create a disk of all the games – it’s just a pity I can’t create an actual XBOX360 disk due to the security features of disks.