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RPG Programming with XNA Game Studio 3.0 (Wordware Game and Graphics Library) |  | Author: James E. Perry
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Publishers
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $23.50
as of 3/14/2010 01:06 CST details
You Save: $16.45 (41%)
New (13) Used (6) from $19.99
Seller: jonathan@jharbour.com
Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 157750
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 1598220659
Dewey Decimal Number: 794.81526
EAN: 9781598220650
ASIN: 1598220659
Publication Date: June 19, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781598220650 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Product Description
RPG Programming Using XNA Game Studio 3.0 provides detailed information on role-playing games (RPGs) and how to create them using Microsoft s XNA Game Studio 3.0. Starting with a brief history of the genre that covers some of the good and the bad games that have been released over the past 30 years, the book then presents information on the various components that make up most RPGs and how to implement them using C# and XNA Game Studio 3.0 to produce a 2D tile-based demo game. Among the topics covered are: Creating the people and creatures that populate RPG worlds; Stats and skills to allow these entities to do things; A magic system; Handling conversations; A quest system; Creating a tile engine for displaying the world; Populating the game world with items and treasure; Implementing a sound and music system; Adding multiplayer support. The book takes a piece-by-piece approach to producing the game, demonstrating how to create the various components and eventually tying them all together to produce a fully-playable demo.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A lot of heart and RPG - little XNA January 28, 2010
Andriy Drozdyuk (Toronto, Canada)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
One can really feel that the author cares and is passionate about the RPG theme, so this is definitely a great book for rpg lovers. The title "RPG Programming USING XNA Game studio 3.0" is not "XNA Game studio 3.0 - RPG style!" for a good reason.
This book is NOT about setting up your 2D camera and drawing Rectangle()s. This can be clearly deduced from the page 191 where the author STARTS to implement the graphical part of the game: "The reason I've held off with graphics is partly because I'm of the opinion that graphics are one of the least important parts of an RPG."
The first almost 200 pages focus completely on building the RPG architecture for the game, having NOTHING to do with XNA. They are just C# classes, data types etc, structured in a well thought out and organized fashion.
The reason I am rating this 4/5 is because I think it shows an important concept of separating logic from graphics. There are some really nice tricks of how to do this throughout the book.
Unfortunately, the book suffers from very little detail in this respect. A lot of time is spent on describing the usual RPG terminology (like dexterity and strength) while some of the more fun XNA related bits (using sprite-batches and other XNA resources outside of the Game-class environment, making use of xna component system, reasons for structuring your project in a certain manner) are glossed over and you are directed towards code.
While reading the book I felt as if any one chapter after page 200 could be expanded into a book of it's own (which I certainly hope the author does, and which I would be glad to read!). Format similar to that of "XNA 3.0 Game Programming Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach" would suit perfectly the authors succinct writing style.
Another downside is that a lot of the code fails to compile with game studio 3.1. While it is possible to fish out and replace references with new and updated 3.1 dlls, I feel as if the author should have made an effort into updating the source code for 3.1 release.
In conclusion, if you are an aspiring game developer, and you've poked around the XNA thing for at least a couple of month, and want to start on a solid RPG game - this book is for you. It will teach you EVERYTHING you ever wandered about how rpgs are made.
RPG Programming USING XNA GAME Studio 3.0 December 3, 2009
James F. Lafritz
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Good book for learning techniques to use in XNA programming. Also teaches you how to develop a full RPG game.
Greate Reference July 18, 2009
Martin L. Contreras (Escondido, CA USA)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I found the book to be very informative. It's not a beginner's book by any stretch of the imagination, but it does cover a lot of very key points dealing with structuring a role-playing game.
Use this book as a reference only and not as a complete guide to role-playing development.
In all I would recommend this book as a must have for those individuals who already create games, but want to break into the role-playing genre.
 Very Difficult To Follow July 13, 2009
Dan Alto (Texas)
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
Beware this book does not hold your hand, it only contains the Skeleton of code required to make an RPG!
I've read many XNA books and this is by far the hardest to follow.
The author bulldozes through the code and neglects to mention what you should be doing.
It's like being given a big sheet of source code and explaining what the code does, but not how to write or use it.
Trying to run the game from the author's companion code only results in errors. As was the author's intention as stated on (Pg. 293).
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