The Legend of the Tomato Quest Tutorial

This is a tutorial that will go through the basics of using the SwinGameSDK to develop a simple Real-time RPG game. By the end of the tutorial you should be able to use the SwinGameSDK to develop an RPG of your own.

You can view the final product on the The Legend of the Tomato Quest page. This includes a promo video, screen shots, and a download of the completed game as an executable and as source code.

Things You Need

 * Motivation to create a game.
 * Knowledge of procedural programming.
 * SwinGameSDK for C# (this tutorial is for C#)
 * Image manipulation program (preferbly Photoshop but Gimp is also good)
 * Visual Studio 2005 or Visual C# 2005 Express Edition or greater
 * Use of Mappy
 * Charas.Ex - A tool for creating animated character sprites (This tutorial will include some characters from Charas.Ex for you).

Starting The Project
You will need to download the latest version of SwinGameSDK for C#. In this tutorial, I will be using Windows version of SDK. You can obtain a copy of the SDK from the Download page (currently under construction so get it from SVN for now). Set of SDK can be found in SDKs -> DOTNet -> Visual Studio -> C#

You can use either the C#.NET Template, or the C#.NET Command line SDK, either is fine.

Compiling The Game
You can compile the game like you would compile and build any Visual Studio project. However, there is a executable file that comes with the SDK called copyresources.cmd which needs to be run manually after you add media to the Game Resources. This executable copies all the media to the appropriate folders so your game can use them.

Setting Up the SDK
When you first get the SDK there are some things that we don't want in our project. The first thing is the title of the OpenGraphicsWindow.

Open the project in Visual Studio and Open the GameLogic.cs source file, and Edit the following line.

From

To

So now our game's Window title will display the correct title. You may also want to change the build name of the game, so that when we build our project, the exe file will have the correct filename.

Goto the GameProject Properties in Visual Studio and select the Application Tab

Change the Assembly Name to the name you want the exe to be called. For this tutorial enter TomatoQuest.

In this tab you can also change the icon, if you want your executable to show a specific icon, but this tutorial won't be changing it.

Also remove the following lines of code from the RunGame method in GameLogic.cs, within the loop.