I know that some of you have been looking for XNA source code examples, beyond what comes with the installation. I’ve looked around, and found a couple of recently released full source XNA games. Great to get inspired, study, use as samples, and just playing on your console!

Rocket Commander for XNA

A “little Christmas present” from Benjamin Nitschke (author of Professional XNA Game Programming), Rocket Commander is like a free Xbox Arcade game for those with Creators Club. Sweet!

20,000 lines of code, 2,000 lines of unit testing, all in one 213 kb package (source only)! To play the game with all the media, you’d need the Full Rocket Commander XNA source code (53 MB). Apparently XNA doesn’t take mp3s, so the converted music is ten times the size of what it should be. Ekk. Check out the website for more info, screenshots, or a Windows installer if you want to just play on a PC.

Microbe Patrol

The goal is to score as many points as possible by creating trails across the play arena without touching any of the microbes. Longer trails score more points. If your player hits a microbe, the current trail is disqualified from scoring any points, and the player will become injured.

This one by Michael Anderson, the Microbe Patrol is a simple but fun game, so it could be easier to follow. Full source and media in one tiny 125 kb download.

This particular game demonstrates some nifty elements, such as “fake” anti-aliasing with XNA and text rendering (via drawing a bunch of lines) – for those without XNA Magic and TrueType vector fonts.

More?

Pretty good examples to get started. I expect more free XNA games to become available with the Dream Build Play (though they are really stretching their “begins in January” date). Know of more game samples to share? Leave a comment!

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