Intro

Hello, my name is Tom Eyerman. I am currently wrapping up my undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins; this is my seecond senior semester. For my independent study, I will be remaking the classic Broderbund game Lode Runner. You control a character who must collect all the gold bars in a level before proceeding to the next. In addition, the player must deal with enemy characters who can both harm your character
and steal gold. The way the player does this is by digging holes where the zombies can fall into. And of course the player may fall through the holes to escape enemies which makes it both an offensive and a defensive gameplay element.

My overarching goal for this project is to create an Xbox 360 game using the XNA framework supplied by Microsoft. My guide on this journey will be O'Reilley's Learning XNA 4.0 by Aaron Reed. My plan is to develop first for Windows systems, then as time goes on re-create the project for Xbox 360 (this can be done with one click in Visual Studio). This idea came to me from the book, which states:

"A typical method for creating games for the Xbox 360 is to create the initial project for
Windows and perform the majority of the coding, testing, and debugging in that
project. Then, once the game is close to completion, you can create a copy of the project
for development on the Xbox 360 and concentrate on Xbox 360‒specific debugging."

Also, Peter doesn't have a 360 so we'll have to do it this way. :) I plan on developing it to be played with the Xbox 360 gamepad, so even input-receiving code between the two should be pretty much the same.