XNA HUD Creator

One of the most tedious tasks when writing a game in XNA Game Studio is the creation of  the HUD (Heads Up Display) and other 2D screens. The programmer manually displays textures, strings, variables and other assets on the screen using vectors and rectangles. Although the programming is not difficult, it can be time consuming and if the programmer isn't careful, the code can become messy. When starting my latest game, I thought it would be much faster to write a program that lets me drag and drop assets onto the screen. XNAHUDCreator is a Windows application that accomplishes this.

How it works:

XNAHUDCreator starts as blank project with one screen. A toolbox on the left lets you set the screen size for the game and has buttons to add textures, strings, flip books and some commonly used variable types. Additional screens can be added to the game, allowing XNAHUDCreator to help with menus and other screens you may want in your game. When you export to your game, XNAHUDCreator makes the required SpriteFonts and copies the assets to a new folder that it creates in your games's Content directory. The assets are added to the project automatically so you don't have to right click in the Solution Explorer. A DrawableGameComponent class is added to your game project for each screen. These classes include all the code required to load and display the assets. An xml file is added to the game that contains the required data.

Download

This program is offered as freeware. If you find it useful and would like to see more software available, M&M Studio accepts donations through PayPal. Go to http://www.mandmrecordingstudio.com/itemstemp.htm and scroll down to the Account Payments section.