Hull Platform 2010 Fun and Games

Did a talk today at Hull Platform 2010. This was the first of what will be an annual event bringing together game developers and expertise.

This picture was taken during my presentation. I hope I wasn’t going too fast for everyone…

Jon Purdy hits the stage

Two minutes into Darren’s presentation….

I had great fun and you were all a wonderful audience. I also got to judge the two competitions that they ran, which was also very interesting, with a high standard of entries. During my talk I said I’d put some resources up on the network for you, as it takes a long time to write these down. So, here they all are.

You can get my presentation, along with the XNA games that I showed during the talk, here:

http://www.robmiles.com/storage/xna-talk/Rob%20Miles%20at%20Platform%202010.zip

To compile and run your C# game programs you will need a development environment. This is where you write the code and run it. You can get free versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio tool for the Windows PC  from:

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

If you want to write C# programs you just go for the C# version of Visual Studio. It takes a while to download, but it is worth waiting for…

If you want to write games you can then add the XNA framework which provides a set of resources for both 2D and 3D games. The framework is currently at version 3.1. You add this to your installation of Visual Studio and you can get the framework from:

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/downloads

If you are a student (and have an Athens account to prove it) you can get free copies of the professional versions of Visual Studio (and lots of other free stuff too) from Microsoft Dreamspark:

http://www.dreamspark.com/

I’ve written a Microsoft Press book which teaches programming using XNA games. You can buy it from Amazon here. You can also obtain a free PDF download of this from the Microsoft Faculty Site here:

http://www.facultyresourcecenter.com/curriculum/pfv.aspx?ID=8119

There is no need to actually sign up for faculty resource membership, you can skip that step. However, if you are a teacher or lecturer you can sign up for membership and get all kinds of good stuff, including an entire programming course based on the book content. The process is a bit of a faff (you have to send them something to prove you are a proper teacher) but it is well worth the effort as you get some valuable resources including free XNA Creators Club membership. This makes it possible for your students to put their games up on the Xbox Indie games site for anyone to download and play via Xbox Live.

If you want a free copy of our C# text book (the same one we teach our students from) you can download it in PDF form from:

http://www.csharpcourse.com

I’ve recorded a bunch of screencasts that cover how to get started writing XNA games. The episodes are available from Thirteen One, which is a Hull based gaming magazine. You can find all the screencasts up to now in my index at VerySillyGames:

http://verysillygames.com/Screencasts

If you want advice on getting started in the games (or any other) business you might find it useful to talk to the Enterprise Centre at the Univesity:

http://www.hull.ac.uk/enterprise

Comments

[Simon Price]

Just wanted to say that I found your talk very entertaining and am considering tinkering with XNA - this from someone whose programming history consists mainly of making rude words scroll across the screen in BASIC!

Thanks!

[Jack]

Hi, Rob. Managed to get there today and I really caught the app making bug.

With regard to iphone development, I was wondering;
Since I doubt I can afford a new Mac, will any old one do?
And does the department have any Mac workspaces open to first years?

I know pretty much naught about Macs btw.

Also very much looking forward to getting stuck into an XNA game over the summer (but that's nothing new).

[Joel]

Was a good day crammed with useful knowledge, well worth the (somewhat) early start, for me anyways.

[Andy]

Hey Rob - also worth letting the students know that they can get DreamSpark software with their .ac.uk email address, which is nice and easy..