Hello XNA Community!

Let me just start off by saying thanks for reading this and... I don't know if this was the right forum to post in for my question (It was either this one or the General forum) but I'll ask anyways.

I've been wanting to make a game for quite a while and I started using XNA about 3 months ago. Amazing program and it just opens so many doors to creating a game.

2 years ago, I had played a game created with Game Maker, a 2D LAN that was pretty much based off of Harvest Moon (Think of the first Harvest, not the 3D ones.) The only problem is that the game was poorly compiled, this simple yet addictingly fun game was flawed in many ways. It used about 80% of my CPU usage and you would have to launch it twice (The game needed to be open for hosting and if you planned on playing you'd need to open it again, already too much for my PC to handle.)

I've always wanted to re-create this game so that it's playable to people with low-end computers, afterall, why would you need a Quad-Core processor and an 8800 GTX to play Super Mario? ;)

So my question was, how could I create a Harvest Moon type game, how would i make the map and have the camera stay focused on the character? If you can't/don't want to tell me the nitty-gritty details could you at least point me off to a sample game that could help me, an article, any type of material that would allow me to gain experience in this area.

I have gotten an XNA Game Studios book but it only covers 1.0, which isn't really a problem, but it doesn't go over that type of game or goes indepht about certain aspects of a Harvest Moon type game.

Also, if you haven't played Harvest Moon, you may have played Pokemon. I want the same concept, the camera would stay over the player's head while they traveled around the map.

I'm really hoping you guys can help! Thanks so much for reading,

-NessDan

Sounds lke you might really like looking at my tile engine series: http://nick.gravelyn.com/tile-engine-series/. Pretty much establishes a lot of what you might want to use. Of course there are always multiple ways to do any one thing, but that will at least show you one way to get started.

Thanks a whole lot!

This looks like what I need, I'll be getting my own laptop soon so I can start programming whenever I need to (I share a computer with my brother and he uses it a lot...)

Thanks so much for the reply!

Nick Gravelyn:

Sounds lke you might really like looking at my tile engine series: http://nick.gravelyn.com/tile-engine-series/. Pretty much establishes a lot of what you might want to use. Of course there are always multiple ways to do any one thing, but that will at least show you one way to get started.

Thank you for some of the coolest Video Tutorials around for XNA. I can actually learn some basics from these. My first project goal is a 2D Side Scroller and up until now, I have yet to find anything that gives some explanations on XNA/ C#. Please, to the powers that be let these become a Sticky somewhere for the beginners. Once again thanks for everything.

Thanks Nick - awesome page and tutorials. Is the tile method still the prefered and accepted method for the most part? I feel like it creates a pretty dated/retro look (not a bad thing), or is that dependent on how good your graphics/pixel skills are?

It's all how good your art is. Lots of people still use tile maps for games because they are fairly easy to set up and pretty efficient for what they do.

The Lost Garden has some very nice tiles for rapid prototyping - specifically for programmers who arent great artists to get a prototype up that still looks nice.

http://lostgarden.com/2008/02/play-with-your-peas-game-prototyping.html

http://lostgarden.com/2007/05/cutegod-prototyping-challenge.html

http://lostgarden.com/2006/07/more-free-game-graphics.html