So my buddy and I decided to attempt making a game. We chose the Microsoft XNA framework to make our game in. We worked on it for a few weeks and found that making games with just the framework is very goddamn difficult.
We got rather far too, we created an animated background, we created animated sprites, we even got as far as approaching collision detection. However nothing worked very well, it looked like shit and it was choppy and slow! That is when my partner took a step back and said, hey we are doing something Wong. I agreed with him, something was stupidly wrong here, why was this so goddamn hard to do?
Started researching and it turns out that we were creating our own game engine for this only game. We were reinventing the wheel... it was terrible. I then at that moment understood why someone would use a game engine.
I thought a game engine was only for pumping out pretty graphics and amazing 3D physics. Turns out, it is much more than that. Game engines are specifically for taking an existing Framework, XNA, in this case and generating code for you based on a bunch of Wizards, forms and mock-ups.
Game Engines are to Gaming Code as Code Smith is to Application Code.
Game engines take all of the CRUD code out of your way and let you design your game in a very neat and orderly fashion. Very impressive stuff.
So I used "The Flat Red Ball" with "Glue" which are free to use and develop with. Bloody amazing tools. I followed their Tutorial on a mock game called Beef Ball which is just another rendition of Pong. It was easy to use and do, fucking amazing. I feel better about this whole deal now.
As soon as I get out of work, I want to get back to using it. Fun shit.
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