Building a Silverlight Game : Part 1 : Introduction & Tools

Table of Contents

• Part 1 : This page
• Part 2 : Starting the Basic Layout
• Part 3 : Adding some rectangles
• Part 4 : Finishing the basic layout
• Part 5 : Changing the cursor
• Part 6 : Setting up a rectangle for dragging
• Part 7 : Getting started with dragging rectangles
• Part 8 : Dragging rectangles
• Part 9 : Dropping rectangles

Introduction

This post kick-starts a series on building your very own Silverlight game. Building games in Silverlight is interesting to me because it is a different world than most of the Silverlight stuff out there. For example, here are the usual things you see in Silverlight tutorials that we will avoid

• We won’t do any data binding
• We won’t be using MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel)
• We won’t have any datagrids
• We won’t be using RIA services or any other framework
• We won’t call any web services

We’ll use nothing but simple XAML and C#, with a heavy emphasis on the C#.

This all started at DevLink 2009.  After giving a presentation on this same topic, someone came up to me and mentioned he’d like to see all of the steps that I took during the presentation laid out as a step-by-step tutorial. That’s what this series is. I hope you find it useful.

First things first, the game we’ll be building is a Towers of Hanoi clone. You can check out a working copy of the game at http://www.smips.com/brad/silverlighttowers . Our finished product will look this this:

Tools

Before we start writing XAML and code, let’s make sure we are familiar with the tools we’ll use

• Visual Studio 2008, SP1.  Get it for free if you don’t have it already.
• Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1.  Download the tools here.
• Expression Blend and Expression Design.  These definitely aren’t free, but they also aren’t absolutely necessary.  Blend and Design can make things easy in some cases, though.  You can download a trial if you want to check these products out.

That’s it for introductions and for tools.  In the next post, we’ll set up the basic layout for our game using Expression Blend (or Visual Studio if you don’t have Expression Blend).