XNAtutorial.com

The Swedish version of George is Joran, so today my namesake George Clingerman of XNADevelopment.com pitches in, and it’s a whopper.

He grew this article by himself, pruning and fertilizing(?) where needed with very little bouncing back and forth between the two of us. Maybe he should be publishing those stories he mentions, considering what an interview he can throw together. (c:

The only major input I’ve had is to sprinkle some links in the text, so any funkiness in those are solely my fault.

In fact, the interview became so big, that I split it into two parts. The first half is more personal, explaining why that guy, George, is. The second half is less personal, and talks more about XNA in general, and where it’s heading.

Thank you so much, George, for your exhaustive answer. I really enjoyed your input, and I hope the readers will too. Here we go.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m just kind of a regular guy. I’m married and have three small boys (ages 6, 3 and 2) and my wife and I are considering having a fourth child.

I went to college in 1996 for Math/Computer Science and graduated in 2000. During college, I played around a little with game programming, but DirectX was really intimidating. So instead, I toyed with making games using just ASCII for the graphics.

The summer after graduation, I got married to my beautiful wife Shawna and started working as an internal software developer for an educational software company using VB 6.0.

During this time, I started developing small little games for my son using VB 6 and DirectX. It was difficult, and had I been doing production level games, I wouldn’t have had the speed I would need, but it worked great for little learning games for my son.

Three years later, I changed companies and began working for a construction software company where I develop with VB.NET, ASP.NET and SQL, which is where I’m still working.

It was during this time that I began playing with Managed DirectX with VB.NET and actually won a game development contest sponsored by “Geeks With Blogs” (a blogging community for geeks).

My company sent me to Microsoft Gamefest during that time (yep, a construction software company sent an employee to Microsoft Gamefest, that’s correct.) and that’s when I learned about XNA. I came back from that conference super excited and told myself that now was my time to hit the ground running.

So during the day, I develop in ASP.NET, VB.NET and work with SQL server and then I play around with game development at night.

See? I’m just a regular guy.

Where does your real passion lie?

I love to program. I code all day at work and then I come home and code. XNA hasn’t really changed it, just made it a lot more fun. I also haven’t done any Windows type development projects at home for quite a while now since XNA came out. All my ideas for those types of projects took a back burner once I started playing with XNA. So, I guess XNA has made me more focused on game development for a longer period of time than I have in the past.

What are your “real life” hobbies?

I grew up on a farm, so of course all of my real life hobbies are indoor ones now.

Yep, I had enough of that country living. I’m an indoor creature, living in the suburbs. My hobbies consist primarily of reading, drawing, writing, playing games and of course making games.

Hmm, I grew up in a 5000-people town, in the middle of the northern forest of Sweden - an hour to the next town. Now I live in Bangkok. But I have to say I miss it, though, unlike you.

I LOVE to read fantasy books and I typically read about three of those a week. I find they help me relax, so the more stress or pressure I’m under, the more books I’ll read.

I’m dyslexic, so I read very slowly. But I still managed to get through Lord of the Rings when I was in fifth grade (it took all year), and I’ve been hooked on fantasy ever since. Maybe it has to do with growing up in the countryside, like you.

I’ve never found anything which quite tickled my fantasy imagination ever since, though. I did find that in science fiction instead. In sixth grade I did Hitchhiker’s Guide, in seventh the Foundation Trilogy, and in eighth the Dune chronicles.

And of course watching the Mad Max trilogy over and over shaped me as well, but that’s like being back in the fantasy genre in a way. But I digress, as usual. Back to your hobbies.

I also like to draw, so I do put some time into sketching and drawing and I have recently been trying to teach myself to use some of the digital art tools. GIMP is my current tool of choice because of the amazing price for that tool.

Ah, drawing is fun, although I don’t consider myself good enough to publish yet. I did buy a graphic board a while back, and I’m getting pretty good with it. What else?

I have a couple blogs that I update occasionally and I do some short-story writing from time to time as well. I have a couple fantasy short-stories I told myself I would try to get published in a magazine this year, but something came out that kind of side-tracked that goal. Maybe next year… I also have a couple children’s stories that I want to get at least one copy published for myself. I wrote them for my boys, but they’re just sitting there waiting for me to finish illustrating them.

When I’m not reading, drawing or writing I’m playing games with my wife and boys. We have a game system in every room of the house, play a lot of board games and play quite a few computer games as well. I tend not to buy the newer game consoles, so you’re not going to be finding an Xbox 360 (yet, but with XNA I’ll obviously be getting one soon!), PS3 or Nintendo Wii in my house, but you would find the original 8-bit NES, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, Coleco Vision, PS1 and PS2 hooked up somewhere. My sons are young, so I’m trying to get them addicted to the classics now so they can learn to appreciate games for their game play and not just for their graphics.

I think it is working.

Are you running any other websites?

I run a few websites with varying degrees of activity at any given time. My current blog is at Geeks With Blogs. It’s a blogging community targeting geeks that I became a member of back when they had a game development contest there. That’s also where I tend to put update announcements to my site.

I also have an older blog that I used to do with a couple of guys I work with. We don’t post to it as much anymore, but occasionally we’ll put something up.

I have a site I maintain for a DJ friend of mine and then a site I do for an old high school friend who’s got a band.

Most of my other website time (besides XNADevelopment.com) goes to my wife’s site. She has a digital scrapbooking store, blog and site extravaganza that I set up and keep maintained. She does awesome work and that’s been a fun project and business to watch grow. Now that the initial setup is done (learning to tweak ZenCart was quite a pain), my work is mostly monitoring and maintenance at this point.

I’ve actually visited My Little Scraps a few times with my wife, since your announcement. She was wondering if you do international shipments, because she is into paper scrapbooking.

Well, since the store only sells digital scrapbooking elements, YES! My wife started out as a paper “scrapper” which sounds like what your wife is currently doing. She then started to get involved with digital scrapbooking community and now does the majority of her scrapbooking digitally.

So all of her store content consists of just a download. No shipping costs, no wait time and no inventory to be re-stocked and managed. If your wife hasn’t tried digital scrapbooking I highly recommend it.

Although if she’s anything like my wife, she still won’t get rid of all those scissors, papers, stamps, ribbons, buttons and other miscellaneous materials that are now taking up half of our garage.  And it’s not necessarily cheaper either since then she’ll want her own laptop, and Wacom tablet and keep begging for the latest version of Photoshop…hmm so maybe I won’t recommend it

But my wife really does love digital scrapbooking and there is a huge community and support out there for new digital scrapbookers so if she’s interested in giving it a try I’m sure my wife could provide a variety of places to start visiting to get integrated.

Digital, huh? I can’t believe I missed that - the pictures looked so… tangible. I guess I was too focused on paper scrapping to notice… I guess she’ll order something when she’s back from Sweden! Where do you find the time to do both?

I don’t. There just isn’t enough time. The gaming is easy to work in to my schedule since all of my family are gamers (including my wife who tends to kick my butt at games like “Rise of Nations” and “HeroScape”). I’m also a luck dad because my kids are all in bed by 8 p.m. so after that, I work on my projects.

Since I love what I’m doing, it’s pretty easy to stay focused. I also make some effort to stay organized and to make sure that I add in other non-coding hobbies into my week to make sure I don’t burn myself out on something I love.

Really, it’s all just about doing what you like. If it’s a torture to do and you were supposed to just be doing it in your spare time, find something else to do. Don’t make yourself hate the things you love.

Which computer, all those years ago, got you hooked?

To be honest it wasn’t a computer that got me hooked. I didn’t even use computers that much before I went to college in 1996. I grew up in a small farm town and the only familiarity with computers I had before college was a small 9-week course on Basic on the Apple IIgs my school had. We were booting those up with 5¼” floppies. So when I got to college, I was in a bit of a technology culture shock.

I went to college with a Math/Computer Science degree already selected. The college I went to (a small private school) gave laptops to all incoming freshman. My roommate was pretty confused when I told him my major and then immediately asked him where the boot floppy was for my laptop. I hadn’t even seen Windows or even a mouse before that day. Needless to say I had a lot of catching up to do that first year to learn just how far technology had come.

Completely the opposite of what I went through. I grew up with computers, starting with C64 and Amiga, then when college came around, I wanted to do something else, so I chose subjects as far removed from computers as possible.

Anyway, what was The Game as a kid?

I’d say the Coleco Vision I had as a kid is what first made me start dreaming of making games. So it was games like Zaxxon and Mr. Do! that made me start imagining, I wonder if I could do that someday.

What game development did you do before XNA?

I did some early game development in college. Playing with ASCII and trying to make game graphics with it. I had a fairly functioning ASCII Pac-Man game going at one point. Then I moved on to VB6 and DirectX, made a couple of small little “games” (if you could call them that). Mostly, the games involved little triangle planes, shooting little triangle enemy ships. Then when Managed DirectX came out, I entered a game development content at “Geeks with Blogs” and that’s what I consider my turning point in game development. I actually ended up winning the contest. It was a blast.

So VB is kind of your “native” computer language?

The way I was trained in college, I don’t have a “native” computer language. They refused to teach us specific languages because they felt it was more important to understand the theory and concepts of development than the syntax of a certain language. When we had to write programs, we used C++, but we did just as much work with just pseudo code. I hated that at the time, but since I’ve graduated, I’ve found that type of learning was a big benefit.

My first job required me to learn VB6 which I picked up really quickly. Then for my second job I needed VB.NET which again, wasn’t too difficult pick up. Then they needed someone to do ASP.NET development, and I just learned that really quickly to. So yeah, I don’t think I have a “native” language, but VB is the one I’ve used most in the workplace.

Why did you jump to C#?

I made the jump to C# for a number of reasons, some of them personal and some of them sort of political I guess. Once upon a time, before .NET, I wouldn’t have made the jump to C# but would have continued to develop with XNA. I just wanted to prove to people that it could be done, you didn’t need C++ to make games, and even a “VB” developer could do it. All you needed to be was a developer first.

Then with .NET, VB got a little bit of respect so there wasn’t as much of a drive to make a point anymore. I did start doing tutorials for Managed DirectX in VB.NET and I have a few of those on my one blog. At that point, I was kind of trying to help the VB guys out. I knew a lot of them that were looking for tutorials and sample code, but they didn’t have the confidence to translate from C# to VB.

With XNA, I toyed with the idea of being a VB with XNA site. I knew I’d get a lot of traffic like that, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue to encourage developers to be afraid of learning other languages. So, I put my line in the sand and decided I would just do everything in C# and would do my best to encourage developers to BE developers. If you know VB, there is absolutely no reason you can’t be coding away merrily in C# in just a couple weeks. I’m hoping I can help convince people of that. As a developer, you’re only benefiting yourself by picking up as many languages and areas of knowledge as you can.

Besides XNA itself, what software do you use in your development process?

The only other software that I tend to use is GIMP for creating digital images to slap into my games. Currently, I don’t spend a lot of time making graphics for my games, but someday, I’ll change that. Slow down and take the time to make the graphics as good as I want them.

I’m still looking at some good software for playing with and making sound effects and simple background music loops, but I just haven’t found one that was quick and easy to meet my pretty simple needs.

Do you have a secret XNA project you haven’t announced?

I am working on a few projects, I signed the NDAs though so I can’t talk about them just yet. But I will…

I also have some projects that are specific to XNADevelopment.com coming up and I’m hoping they are a big help to the community. Sometimes it’s a real struggle trying to provide tutorials for the community and just developing fun projects for myself.

Why did you choose to make an XNA community site, as opposed to just working on a game by yourself?

To be honest, I did it for all those people out there like myself who found getting into game development so overwhelming and unnecessarily complicated.

Game development doesn’t need to be as complicated as people make it. I think the true challenge is to say, ok, what do I know how to do. How can I make a game knowing just that.

I really think that’s how you push innovation with making a game. It’s not pushing the boundaries on technology, but taking existing technology and knowledge and pushing THAT as far as you can. If you can move a sprite around on a screen, you can figure out a game to make with that. That’s one reason I chose to make a community site.

Also, by doing tutorials and game samples, I really help cement concepts in my head. So I use it as a learning and training tool for my own game development as well.

…and who said I wasn’t working on a game by myself? We aren’t allowed to do both?

Who is XNADevelopment.com for?

XNA Development is targeted for 2D game developers. Those people who have never made a game before, but really would like to try. It’s for people that understand before they can make their “awesome game idea that no one else has ever had”, that they have to crawl first and make some of the standard games. It’s for people to learn the basic concepts of game development and then run with those newfound skills to make the next stage in the game development evolutionary process.

I think game development works like that and I think 2D development is the beginning training grounds for game developers.

People are so excited about 3D development, but there are just so many ideas that work just as well in the 2D world. 3D development is a complicated topic and introduces a lot of concepts particular to 3D that aren’t necessarily particular to games.

I want people to learn how to make games first, and then they can go to the next step and learn how to make their 3D games. I also just want to make it look easy. I want people to realize that if you can learn the basics of C# development, you can make a game.

I think one reason that XNADevelopment.com has been popular is because of the simple nature of the tutorials. I also have a couple of full games for download and that always seems to attract attention.

I also get a lot of traffic from the MSDN XNA forums, so I think my involvement in helping the community out by answering as many questions as I can has helped a lot as well.

What’s next?

I want to do smaller projects. Lots and lots of smaller projects. I got really excited about being able to make games so I started doing that, but I kind of lost my focus and I definitely regret not having tutorials to accompany my larger projects. I hope to correct that someday, but it’s hard to go back through a project and write the tutorials after the fact.

I want to focus on providing examples of how to do the smaller pieces in games. I want a series of tutorials showing HOW you might do something and then I want people to be able to pull everything they’ve learned from the site and be able to put it all together into their own complete game.

Then, I want to tackle tutorials for the basic building block for new game developers. Tetris, Pac Man and a 2D side scroller like Mario, those types of game. All of those early games that teach you a lot about how you take different game development concepts and turn them on their heads to achieve new types of game play.

Second part coming soon…

Cheers!

Joran