This article originally appeared at IndieGameReviewer.com and is republished here with permission.

The original article has been expanded and embellished here for those more focused on the Xbox Live Indie Game Community.

I have been having fun playing with the free XNA Game Studio 3.1.  Although I have a moderate ability with programming C#, there are excellent tutorial videos available at the XNA Game Studio site that walk you through every line of code you need to program a basic game.

One of the best ways to learn coding is to be fearless and hack away / reverse engineer code and see what the results are.  So long as you understand how and why you break the code and get bugs, you are learning how to do it yourself.

At the time this article was originally published, there was a serious lack of RPG content on Xbox 360 Indie Game marketplace (since then we have started to see some truly excellent titles emerge like Masters of Belial, Breath of Death VII, and Dungeon Adventure although these focus less on storylines and more on classic hack n’ slash adventure type RPGs) so I did a search and lo and behold there is a recently uploaded starter kit for an RPG!

Once you have installed the free Microsoft’s Visual Studio C# Express Starter Edition and XNA Game Studio 3.1 (also free), you need simply download and install the RPG Game Starter Kit and can open it as a template from the software.

There are some basic XML based tutorials for how to create your own quests, and if you are feeling brave you can start the time-consuming process of creating your own custom Sprites and background textures to make the game feel more like your own. If you want to make this a lot easier, consider using a free program like GraphicsGale to build, develop, animate and save your game sprites.

• For example Parachnidox posted a mod that demonstrates how to transform your RPG from one where you interact with things by walking into them, into a more elegant system where you can click on objects with which you wish to interact by clicking on them.

Check out Parachnidox’s RPG Starter Kit Quick & Easy Click Interaction System at the XNA Forums

• Here is another interesting and helpful thread from EEKER at the XNA RPG Starter Kit Forums about creating Multi-Window Dialogs with a content pipeline intro.
• Charlie Calvert has also created a useful post for those just getting started with Role-Playing Game Starter kit, that discusses the Tile and Quest engines, respectively. It’s worth a look if you haven’t played around with this sort of backend before and need to grasp the fundamentals.

In the early days of the RPG Starter Kit, a guy by the name of Craig Giles decided he wanted to teach himself to code in 3 months with XNA using the RPG starter kit as a launching point.  His so-called “ShackRPG” named after the Shack community he frequented, demonstrated some very interesting customizations, expansions and developments to the start kit that showcased its potential.  

Here is a video of the ShackRPG progress – note the dropdown menus, follow-cam, smooth avatar movement and more.  He also ended up introducing a very stylish “cover-flow” style inventory system and deeply modified combat system.  Though ShakcRPG was just the startoff point for a game with the working title Mier, sadly, not much has been updated since 2008, but he did make the source code for his work freely available for study at Google’s codeplex.

Note that none of these hacks or mods are guaranteed to work; there are many reasons why they may or may not. What is important is to read along and understand how they are thinking about the code structure and the possibilities within the framework so that you can begin to make more informed decisions for yourself and customize the game in your own way.

A screenshot from the free XNA Role Playing Game Starter Kit

Here is the direct link to the main Role-Playing Game Starter Kit thread at the XNA Game Studio forums.

What I did was read some of the above posts and discussions and then after getting everything installed, started customizing little things within the existing demo game that comes with the RPG Starter Kit. At first I just changed some of the dialog or the starting position of an NPC. Later, I began extending the quests or altering background images. Then I moved on to creating my own custom animated sprites and changing the maps around. In the meantime, I was developing an understanding of how the various modules were interacting and put together, until finally I was building my own from scratch.

Eventually, I realized I had a pretty cool storyline with some very interesting characters, but really I was just writing it as I went along. Any author or editor will tell you, however, that this is not the best way to create a truly great story; before you get in too deep, take some time to map out your story, characters, quests and graphic style and start over again with these goals in mind. Whether you choose to continue with the RPG starter kit at this point, or begin with a fresh basic template is up to your comfort level with programming in this software environment. Regardless, you will come away with a far richer understanding for how this sort of game can be put together.

Because great RPGs are more about excellent storytelling and world-building than anything else, I encourage you to at the very least, go and tinker with the RPG Starter Kit and the free-to-download XNA Starter Kit.  I do caution that you may lose night after night of sleep as you descend into the limitless word of game building, but you will at least know that in the end you can submit your project for peer review and maybe ultimately turn a buck by selling your wares on Xbox Live someday in exchange for your efforts.

Note: in order to test your game directly on your Xbox 360, get reviewed or put it up for sale, you will have to purchase a premium membership – $99.95 annually. However, you can still program games for Windows PCs that you can distribute to your friends – free.

Will you build the first great role-playing for Xbox Indie Games? If you have the constitution, courage and thirst for knowledge to take up the quest, a great adventure awaits you!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Panelists Include: Denise Novosel [Moderator] – (Staffing Manager IEB and E&D, Microsoft), Kim Swift (Game Designer, Valve Software), Kelvin Sung (Associate Professor Computing and Software Systems, University of Washington Bothell), Ron Jenkins (The Guildhall at SMU, Deputy Director), Joshua Hernandez (Producer, Metamoorephosis)

As a bonus here is IGN’s Top 100 Game Developers: Dave Perry – Breaking Into the Industry

Click here to view the embedded video.

Developer

Developer Summary:
Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The visual programming environment allows rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input. Share your creations with friends over XBOX LIVE.

What We Think:
Kodu Game Lab is a unique and engaging Xbox Live Indie game, if you can call it that; it allows you to create your own games by providing you with a set of characters, objects, and environment editing tools, as well as allowing you to program (on a very high-level) different constraints and events.

Don’t get too excited – you can’t create the next Call of Duty game in Kodu.  However, it is a very stimulating way to get a very basic introduction to programming and to be rewarded for your creativity.  One example of a game I created was a maze-type game where you would have to navigate your way through a series of different rooms with various obstacles.  The first was a narrow bridge with clouds that try to kill you.  The next was a large room with jump pads that you had to use to reach a very high point.

You can program winning conditions, character hit points, paths for object movement, and so much more.  Each object and character has its own unique physical characteristics, as well. For example, the motorcycle is fast and can jump, but is difficult to steer, whereas the star is extremely fast and can turn on a dime.  You can also include support for up to four players in the game!   The idea is that while you can’t create a game of epic proportions (especially since you have limited amount of memory usage for each game), you can create pretty interesting things if you have innovative ideas.

Rating: ★★★★★