Tutorial 11 : Creating the GUI (Part 2)

In this tutorial we will be adding a generic button class to our project, and then we will be using this class to add buttons to our toolbar. We will keep this button class a general as possible so it can be re-used throughout the project.

Tutorial 10 : Creating the GUI (Part 1)

Sorry for the delay in tutorials, but real life got in the way again. In this tutorial we are going to make a start on our games interface, the interface I'm going to show you how to make is going to be incredibly simple for now.

By the end of this tutorial we will have a toolbar that runs along the bottom of our game window that will show the player some useful information.

Tutorial 9 : Multiple Waves

In this tutorial we are going to create the class that will handle the creation of our waves, update our waves, and then move the player onto the next wave when the previous one has finished.

This will be one of the most important classes in our game. We are going to store all our waves in one big queue, and just move through them one by one with a short period of time in-between waves so the player has time to breath and make new towers. This class will also determine how many enemies we create per wave, so we can make the waves harder as time progresses.

Tutorial 8 : Waves (Featuring Tower Modifications)

In this tutorial we will be focusing on creating so called “waves” of units.

We will start off by fixing some nasty bugs that I overlooked in the last two tutorials.

Then we will move onto creating our Wave class. This will contain information such as how many enemies should be created this wave, and which of these created enemies are still alive. It will be responsible for creating, updating and drawing the enemies.

For the sake of simplicity I am not going to add in any “boss levels” or “fast levels” etc. for now as that would mean coming up with some pretty difficult formulas!

Tutorial 7 : Firepower

Now that we have the ability to place down tower’s and have a basic targeting system working, we can move onto making our tower’s shoot so we can finally obliterate that little black dot smugly walking along our path!

We are going to start off by creating our first type of tower, the “Arrow Tower”, then move on to creating a “Bullet” class, and to top it all off, we will combine the two classes and create a targeting shooting tower.

Tutorial 6 : Tower Management

This tutorial will mainly focus on how the player will add in new towers through the addition of a new class called “Player.cs”.

The Player class will hold all the information about a specific player, such as how much money he has, what stage he is on etc. The reason we are putting all this information in it’s own class and not just in “Game1.cs” is that if we do decide to make this game multiplayer, it will make it much easier to store information about each person playing.

Tutorial 5 : Towers

Now that we have something to shoot at, I think it is about time that we start adding in the “Tower” part of our Tower Defence. We will start off by creating a simple base class for the tower and getting it drawn, then we will move on to making it aim at our enemy. I will be leaving shooting, and placement of towers till next time. So, lets begin!

Tutorial 4 : Waypoints

In this tutorial, I will show you a method on how we can get our newly created enemy’s to follow the path that we have drawn out on our level.
The first big hurdle we face is, how will an enemy where the path is, when should he turn, when does he know when he is at the end of the path? This is where waypoints come in, when we are designing our levels, we can specify a set of points along a path (normally on the corners of paths), then when we load in our levels, we will tell our enemy’s that we want them to move between these points until they reach the end of the path.

As shown in the image above, we will specify a start and an end for the enemy, as well as intermediate points.

Tutorial 3 : The Enemy Class

To start with, we will be creating a new class called "Enemy.cs", this will be a base class for all our enemy's, whether they are bosses or fast units or just plain cannon fodder.

So to start with add a new class called "Enemy.cs", then add the following using statements :

using Microsoft.Xna.Framework;

using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics;

From now on these 2 namespaces will need to be added to nearly every class, so I am just going to assume that you will remember to add these.