XNA 4.0 Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide

Summary

Gemstone Hunter implements the basics of a platform-style game, allowing the player to move around on a tile-based game world. Key concepts from the Gemstone Hunter game include:

• An alternative approach to sprite-based animation, using animation strips whose dimensions determine the number of frames in the animation instead of specifying individual frames from a larger sprite sheet
• Deriving multiple game object types from a base type and specializing the behavior of each of the child types while maintaining basic interaction with the game world from the base class
• Implementing gravity and tile map based collisions to allow the player to explore the game world
• Parsing the map codes we generated in the Level Editor to populate the game world ...