Hi everyone! I am Giuseppe Maggiore, one of the members of the VS85Team (the other two guys are Giulia Costantini and Alessandro Piva). Together we will show you how to build games from scratch with the aid of Microsoft XNA, and to do so you will need no previous knowledge of anything, except basic programming and some algebra (don’t worry, we will keep that to a minimum 
).
Personally, I will walk you through what is required to build a space battle between good and evil spaceships. Here are some pictures to show you what you will be capable of doing after following our tutorials.
This demo features warp effects with bloom (notice how the ships appear to "sink" into the light). This effect
requires render targets, heavy pixel and vertex shaders,
and the application of an interesting post-processing
effect called Gaussian Blur. We will also use the stencil buffer to optimize this technique, and in doing so we will find out how to reduce the cost of a heavy pixel shader that does not interest all pixels!
Secondly, we will implement the actual battle: ships will try to flank each other, shooting missiles that will explode and will blow into pieces. Energy surges will
shield the ships from some damage, but ultimately the
damaged vessel will be blown up in a relatively complex explosion effect, featuring particles moving around and alpha blending.
We will soon start with the tutorials, but know that here you can find the source code for this demo: it is in its very early stages, but if you wish to take a look, feel free to do so !