What sort of games can developer creates using XNA & Silverlight?

Question

I need innovative ideas on Gaming Application for Windows Phone. Can anyone guide me to how to approach new ideas on gaming application? How shall i start as i am new to this domain? No gaming experience at all? Also i have worked only on C & C++. But now i have to work on gaming application using C# with XNA framework & Silverlight for windows phone 7.

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Abhi,

XNA will be better for graphics intensive, 3d or games with complex animations utilising more of the GPU. Silverlight can be used for games less demanding of graphics processing.

Answer 2

Before bumping into a certain framework, and even before approaching a gaming idea, you might wanna invest some time learning C# first. Knowing that you're from a C/C++ background, you should find yourself highly familiar with C#.

Later on, the XNA creators community have extensive libraries, samples and tutorials that can guide you to assimilate XNA.

I wouldn't recommend going for Silverlight unless you want to build an application, and not a game. XNA has an enormous performance/quality boost because it natively uses the GPU for most graphics algorithms including 100% hardware accelerated rendering. Additionally, it has so many game-programming specific libraries and classes that can make your life a lot better.

I remember a highly-animated XNA 2D game of mine was consuming around 2-3% of CPU usage compared to 60% of a much simpler Silverlight game.