XNA RPG - Learning XNA while building a RPG, a 26 part tutorial series

E3 2011 is a little more than a month away, the expo where nearly all the cool gaming news comes out. There's rumors that there's news coming about development "stuff" for the XBox 360 and E3 seems like the logical time for that news to be released.

To give you a leg up and help you catch that wave, today's post is curtsey of Jamie McMahon and his very cool  XNA Game Programming Adventures, XNA 4.0 RPG Tutorials series.

The series takes you from install to a playable 2D RPG with each in the series building on the last. The tutorial includes not only building the game but a game/level editor too.

Part 1 - Getting Stated
This first tutorial is about getting started with the role playing game, Eyes of the Dragon. I create the basic project, two class libraries, and some components that will be used through out the rest of the tutorials.

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Part 4 - Tile Engine
The forth tutorial is about adding in a tile engine for the game. The tile engine is what you will use to draw the maps the player will use to explore your world. In the next tutorial I will add in more to the tile engine.

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Part 10 - Character Classes
This adds in some basic classes for characters in the game and a class to represent the world the game takes place in.

Part 11A - Game Editor
In this tutorial I add in an editor for the game and move from a static character class system to a dynamic character class system. This is part one of a three part tutorial.

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Part 16 - Quests and Conversations
This tutorial covers adding in some basic classes that will be needed down the road for conversations and quests. It also updates the game to use the classes from the past two tutorials.

Part 17 - Finding Loot
This tutorial covers the basics of placing chests for the player to interact with. They are just being drawn at the moment but picking them up will come eventually. I also added in a couple place holder classes for traps.

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Part 25 - Level Editor Part 3
I continue on with the level editor in this tutorial adding in some more features and making the drawing a little more responsive.

Part 26 - More on Skills
This tutorial covers adding in more about skills to the game. I also updated the game state manager to have a short transition time between screens.

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Here's a Solution snip from the Part 26 code. Each part has it's own Solution/source, so you can focus on the specific topic being covered. As you can see there's a good bit of code available (which compiled and ran the first time for me)

Each part not just a short blurb, for example Part 26 was 15 pages...

It's interesting looking behind the curtain at an RPG like this, seeing how Jamie designed its content. For example, almost everything is serialized XML;

If you're interested in XNA and game building, this series should be a good read for you...

Here’s a few more links you might find interesting:

• App Hub
• WP7 "XNA for Silverlight Developers" Series
• Mixing the Game State Management and Platformer XNA Recipes
• Dungeons, Dungeons, a DSL for a Dungeon...

Page thumbnail curtsey of Nicolás Sanguinetti