Professional XNA™ Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360™ and Windows® with XNA Game Studio 2.0, Second Edition

Chapter 8. Post-Screen Shaders and the Rocket Commander Game

Well, it was fun to write the graphics engine the last couple of chapters, but where is the next game? Don't worry; in this chapter a really cool game will be examined: Rocket Commander. The original version was released in March 2006, when the German www.Coding4Fun.de site went online and Visual Studio 2005 came out in Germany. One month and many thousands of played games later, the English Rocket Commander Tutorial Videos were created and two additional mods were released with it. Half a year later, 100,000 games were played online—even more if you consider the number of people who were playing offline. Many other mods were also created and the engine proved to be reliable enough, even for two commercial games that were released with the Rocket Commander engine: Pizza Commander and Rocket Racer.

The Rocket Commander game and the complete source code are free to download, and you are encouraged to play around with it or even use it to create your own games. I received many nice stories via e-mail of people learning C# for the first time, and they were able to create their own engines and games in a short time thanks to the Rocket Commander and the video tutorials on the German and English Coding4Fun sites.

Let's just say the Rocket Commander game was a success. I didn't get rich or anything, just famous. In December 2006, the final version of the XNA Framework and XNA Game Studio Express were finally released and I was ...