Who is this for?

This is for people who have an interest in learning to program games for fun but wouldn’t know where to start. I’ll assume no programming experience at all but this won’t be an in-depth tutorial on pure programming. I’ll point out the basics as we go and refer the reader to more in-depth information so they can fill in any gaps as they gain more experience.

What will I need?

Well, you won’t need any money. Everything we will be using will be free and legal. Specifically, we will be using XNA Games Studio Express to program our games.

Any reasonably powered pc from the last 5 years should be capable of building and running the demonstrations I’ll be sharing. There is also the option to run the demos on an Xbox 360. That does cost money but isn’t a requirement at all, you will be able to follow along just as well on a PC.

The official hardware recommendation from Microsoft is:

“To run XNA Framework games on Windows, you will need a graphics card that supports Shader Model 1.1 or greater and DirectX 9.0c. We recommend that you use a graphics card that supports Shader Model 2.0 because some samples and starter kits may require it.”

You’ll need a couple of downloads. These are fairly big but if you are on broadband, it shouldn’t take you too long to get them. First, download and install Visual C# Express Edition. You are also going to need the Visual C# Express Service Pack too. Install Visual C# Express Edition and then run the service pack.

Run Visual C# Express Edition and then register it. Although you can register later, you’ll need to run Visual C# Express at least once before installing the XNA Game Studio in the next step.

Finally, you need to install Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Refresh edition.

They are quite some download, aren’t they? While you are waiting for the files to download, read ahead and find out a bit more about Game Studio Express, XNA Framework, C# and the other new terms that are mentioned above.