Article: Arbitrarily Shaped Secondary 2D Viewports
by Harry Trautmann
This tutorial shows a technique to implement a secondary 2D viewport which has a shape that does not need to be rectangular, but can be customized by the programmer. Even moving sprite shapes are possible. Utilized code techniques: secondary rendertarget (of XNA Game Studio 3.1) and an alphamap by a pixelshader (PS 2.0).
This tutorial is for beginner to intermediate level programmers. At least you should know the oo basics and know the nitty-gritty about the XNA framework. Also, basic shader programming is explained somewhere else (e. g. here: http://www.sgtconker.com/2009/11/crash-course-in-hlsl/)
Article: XNA Farseer Platform Physics Tutorial
by Roy Triesscheijn
Today I’m going to introduce you to a neat 2D physics engine for XNA called Farseer. With the help of this 2D physics engine we are going to create a small platform ‘game’ while introducing the important concepts of Farseer like bodies, geometry, joints and springs.
By the end of the tutorial, you'll be able to build something like:
Article: Rolling World Tutorial
by Christian Schlager
When you look around the XBox Indie Games Channel, there aren't a lot of 3D games around. Most XNA games only feature 2D graphics. I hope to contribute with this tutorial to making 3D graphics a bit less intimidating. And maybe the little prototype we will create throughout the next pages will be the starting point of a great 3D indie game by one of you 
We will make a prototype that features the kind of rolling world effect that you can see in games such as Animal Crossing or DeathSpank. We will also create the textures and 3D models that go along with the rolling effect and recreate the combination of 2D art with a 3D world you can see in the game DeathSpank.
Article: Character Movement
by David Kendall
When development started on The Casino, a lot of things were implemented quickly to get the game to a playable state as soon as possible with the intention of coming back to these parts at a later point. In order to achieve character movement quickly, character movement that can be found in most XNA tutorials were added. This involved the character strafing and moving based upon the left thumbstick and rotation of the character based upon the right thumbstick.
This control scheme may seem familiar to some of you, and it should as it is reminiscent of the controls for a First Person Shooter (FPS). However, The Casino is in no way a FPS. In fact I don't know what you would classify it as. I also had an aim when designing the controls...to keep it simple. This was so players of all ages and skills could pick up and play the game as quickly as possible. This meant that the FPS control scheme had to go.
Article: I Can Has Platformer? (Part 5)
by Casey Young
Welcome back to the fifth part of my series on how to create a simple platformer game. In this article, we give our hero something to collect.
Article: I Can Has Platformer? (Part 4)
by Casey Young
Welcome back to the fourth part of my series on how to create a simple platformer game. In this article, we give our hero a purpose to live.
Article: Simple 3D Camera in XNA
by Pete Street
How do I make a 3D camera?
This is the most common question I hear from people starting out with 3D game development.
There are many different types of possible cameras and various ways to achieve each of them. The amount of unique camera samples available online, while some are more complicated than others, can be daunting to those just beginning with 3D games.
Additionally, it’s frustrating and nearly impossible to combine two different samples without doing some serious hacking.
My goal for this tutorial is to remove that frustration from 3D-beginners by providing a back-to-basics approach to three of the most common types of cameras used in games:
- a free camera
- a chase camera
- a orbit camera
Article: Multiple columns with game state management
by Jeff Brown
This tutorial is based on the Game State Management (singleplayer games) from the xna website but the Network Game State Management (multiplayer games) can also be used based on your needs. There's no better place to start and I believe every game should incorporate one of the two. For this tutorial I'll be using the game state management but both should be nearly identical except for some multiplayer menus but those don't apply here.
This tutorial focuses on adding left and right movement to your menus so you can have multiple columns of menus.
NOTE: I have debug code in to modify the number of columns and number of menu entries in-game just to show how you can scale it very easily. You can download the project here to play with it. Left/right triggers add/remove menu entries and left/right shoulder buttons increase/decrease the number of columns.
Article: WCF on the Windows Phone 7–The How to Guide
by Simon Jackson
Well at the behest of Michael B McLaughlin (@MikeBMCL on Twitter), here's a run down of what you need to know to get WCF working on the Windows Phone 7, both for Silverlight and XNA. This is just going to be a brief overview and the full detail will be included in the LeaderBoard sample for Silverlight and XNA coming soon.
Many thanks to @MikeBMCL pointing me to this post by Michael Cummings who details one approach to getting WCF working for XNA. It does work, but it’s a long way round. It did however point me in the right direction to solve the problem and now I’ve got WCF working the way I Like it. As in Working.
Article: Scripting on the Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Beyond!
by UberGeekGames
Scripting. It’s a recurring theme on the XNA forums: “Can I use Lua?” “Can I script on the Xbox 360?” “Scripting FTW! No, scripting FTL!”. Do a quick search for “scripting” on the XNA forums and you’ll find many threads with the preceding themes. There’s a lot of information about scripting, and it usually ends with “no, you can’t do scripting on the Xbox, and it’s probably not a good idea anyway”.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you what scripting is, a very useful type of scripting that I’ve been using more and more, and how you can make your own scripting system and use it effectively.