I should have started this blog a while ago, because it helps your brain remember things if you flesh it out on paper.
I recently went through a tutorial called The Wizard. I think i can safely say that I didn’t like it. The design of the project starts out nicely. You’ve got your game, which has a wizard, which extends the Sprite class. Got it. They even go into spritesheets, of which the implementation details are new and useful to me. They talk about game states, and they are required for game design.
The code after that is… poor. What you end up with is a sprite you can move around on the screen, but which can only respond to a single command at a time. It’s like those old games, like Dragon Warrior, where you’d press a button and the character would move, during which you couldn’t do anything else. I don’t think any new code should result in something like that. Even the most basic tutorials on the XNA site don’t result in something like that. Then again, i bet this type of implementation would work well for a board game.