JV.Games.XNA
What is this project?
This project aims to provide base classes and helpers to create simple games.
It is structured to help in 3 main areas:
- Describe and position UI elements (with xamarin-forms)
- Support for Async / Await
- Sprites / Animations creation
Describe and position UI elements (with xamarin-forms)
Support for using Xamarin.Forms layout elements to create your game UI / layout overlays.
It allows you to create a Xamarin Forms VisualElement and convert it into an XNA IGameComponent.
Giving you support for using Xamarin.Forms Grid / Stack / Image / Label / Button / ContentPage, etc.
It also supports using custom renderers in case you need it.
Before:
After:
See Sample.XForms
An initial version of this project was used in conjunction with DioMuller, and this is the xaml for this XNA game's title screen: https://github.com/DioMuller/ai-enemies/blob/master/src/Enemies/Enemies.Shared/GUI/ScreenTitleMain.xaml
Support for Async / Await
Games are usually composed of many async operations that are overlooked, and by async I do NOT mean threads / background execution, but:
Operations that start now, and will finish eventuallly, for example:
Game screens / levels
- they open (start),
- have its logic,
- and eventually complete, with a result or not
Character operations, like chasing other character for example:
- they start the chase
- will keep on trying to reach their target for many game frames
- eventually they will reach their target or get lost
And C# Tasks are great for representing this operations, they allow you to create reusable / composable methods, without getting lost in callbacks.
The projects that help on this area are:
- Jv.Games.Context
- Jv.Games.Async
- Jv.Games.Activities
Jv.Games.Context
Base representation of game operations, their state and result.
Jv.Games.Async
Adds async/await support on game operations. Context extensions so they interact with Tasks easily. Support for runing on old .Net Frameworks with a custom async bridge implementation.
Jv.Games.Activities
Async representation of a game scren into a Microsoft.Xna.Framework.IGameComponent, so it integrates easiy with XNA and can be added / removed during execution. Allows your game screen to have a result, and use an async method to describe what happens next.
Sprites / Animations creation
Support for loading a spritesheet or a set of images and describing your character animations.
My view on this project
This is an old project that I enjoyed playing with in the past.
I would need to revisit and modernize this, with .Net Standard and newer Xamarin.Forms implementations.
I would also like to rewrite the sprites project, and allow loading sprites from json files / directory structures.
I don't plan on doing those soon, since I don't have as much free time as I need.
This project was receiving random github stars, so I did a git-clone of this project and it does run without any dependencies, so I created this README to show this project some love.
I do plan however to add more sample projects, since I had more of those, if I find them somewhere.
I hope it helps inspire you.