VB.NET as a game development tool

Question

I come from a Mac background. I developed games with Xcode and Objective-C frameworks.

Recently I moved to Windows and decided to use VB.NET for a while. It is cool.

Here is my intention: I want to develop a Windows platform game. The game is rather complex, and I will need some kind of "engine" or "editor" to be able to edit my levels and properties easily. The idea is that I can build most of the game with this editor and then the editor will compile the project files and resources into one .exe file for gaming.

Fortunately, I was able to create my editor with VB.NET. I am able to edit levels and such. However, I am not sure about the "compilation" part to create a .exe file and play the game.

Basically I am at the point of designing the "Compile" button in my editor. But I am clueless. I could not find much documentation regarding this topic.

My editor has all variables and information the game needs to run.

I assume that this .exe file is like another VB.NET project (produced by my editor) that will basically take the data it comes with and "run" the game loop alright.

Any ideas, links, etc? Thanks.

**Note: my game is a 2d game with, probably, a vast amount of sprites and such.

Answer 1

Visual Studio is a fantastic IDE for development of Windows apps. Compiling the project is pretty simple. You just compile and it gives you an exe that's in the .NET Framework. Microsoft also has XNA Game Studio to help with game design if you want to look at gaming frameworks for .NET.

Also, you can take files from your editor if they generate vb.net and use the vbc compiler command to compile them into libraries, executables, whatever you like. The command could be something like this:

vbc /reference:Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll File.vb

Here's a link to the .NET command line compiler for VB.NET.

Answer 2

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Are you saying that you have an editor (something like a level or map editor?) for your game, and that you want the output of this editor to be embedded into the exe for your actual game application when it compiles?

If that's the case (or something similar to it) then you'll first want to consider how to persist your data to file. Then you could manually add files you've created as embedded resources. Or better yet, create a file type that holds as many 'levels' or 'maps' as you need and embed that. This way as you create more they will just get added to that file and you won't have to keep adding more embedded resources.