How can I make a collection of mini-games in XNA where the user can download packs of minigames and the main .exe can run them without being altered?

Posted by Pyroka on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Pyroka
Published on 2010-10-29T14:14:27Z Indexed on 2011/01/28 23:39 UTC
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XNA

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c#

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best-practices

I'm currently making a PC game in XNA. It's actually a collection of mini-games (there's 3 mini-games at the moment) however I plan to make and add more, in downloadable 'packs'.

My question is, what's the best way to achieve this?

Currently my thoughts are:

Create a 'game' interface
Build games to this interface but create them as .dlls
Have the main .exe file scan a directory and load in the .dlls at runtime.

I've not messed around with the idea much, but I know there are applications at-least that use this plug-in approach (Notepad++ seems to), but I'm not sure of any games that do (although I'm sure they must exist). However it seems that this is a problem that has been solved previously, so I'm wondering if there's any form of established best-practice.

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