Chapter 8. Gemstone Hunter Put on Your Platform Shoes

Gemstone Hunter places the player in the role of an adventuring, treasure hunting archeologist, roaming the wilderness collecting gemstones while avoiding zombies, skeletons, and mummies.

Unlike the other games presented in this book, Gemstone Hunter will not automatically generate levels. For this reason, the game can be viewed more along the lines of a project starter to explore topics like combining Windows Forms and XNA to produce a level editor, and an introduction to the basics of building a platform-style game.

The XNA Creator's Club website provides a number of "Starter Kits" that contain sample code and images to get you started on developing specific types of games. The Platform Starter Kit was introduced with XNA 3.1 and included in the XNA Game Studio distribution. We are going to make use of some of the graphics from this Starter Kit in Gemstone Hunter. We will not use the actual starter kit itself, however, as we want to build on some of the code we have established in our prior games and focus on key aspects of the platform genre.

In this chapter, we will begin the development of Gemstone Hunter by building a map editor for the game. In order to do so, we will cover:

  • Expanding our existing tile map engine
  • Adding multiple projects to a Visual Studio solution
  • Adding a Windows Form to an XNA game project
  • Communicating between Windows Forms and our game code
  • Loading and saving map files via serialization

Borrowing graphics

We will not be directly using XNA's Platform Starter Kit, but we will be borrowing the graphical resources for the player's character and enemy monsters from the project. We will begin by creating the project that will eventually house our completed game:

Borrowing graphics
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