Chapter 1, Preparing the Environment, helps you install everything needed for this book, and build a small application using SFML to test whether everything is fine.

Chapter 2, General Game Architecture, User Inputs, and Resource Management, explains general game architectures, managing user inputs and finally, how to keep track of external resources.

Chapter 3, Making an Entire 2D Game, helps you build Asteroid and Tetris clones, learning entity models and board management.

Chapter 4, Playing with Physics, provides a description of physical engines. It also covers the usage of Box2D paired with SFML, and turns our Tetris into a new game, Gravitris.

Chapter 5, Playing with User Interfaces, helps you create and use a game user interface. It introductes you to SFGUI and adding them to our Gravitris game.

Chapter 6, Boost Your Code Using Multithreading, introduces multithreading and adapts our game to use it.

Chapter 7, Building a Real-time Tower Defense Game from Scratch – Part 1, helps you create animations, a generic tile map system (isometric hexagonal tiles), and an entity system. Finally, you will create all the game logic.

Chapter 8, Build a Real-time Tower Defense Game from Scratch – Part 2, Networking, introduces network architectures and networking. It helps you create a custom communication protocol, and modify our game to allow multiplayer matches over the network. Then, we finally add a save/load option to our game using Sqlite3 through an ORM.

To be able to build the projects covered throughout this book, you are assumed to have knowledge of the C++ language with its basic features, and also parts of the standard template library, such as strings, streams, and containers. It's important to keep in mind that game development is not an easy task, so if you don't have the prerequisites, it can get frustrating. So, don't hesitate to read some books or tutorials on C++ before starting with this one.

This book is for developers who know the basics of the SFML library and its capabilities for 2D game development. Minimal experience with C++ is required.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We also add the point calculation to this class with the addLines() function."

A block of code is set as follows:

AnimatedSprite::AnimatedSprite(Animation* animation,Status
status,const sf::Time& deltaTime,bool loop,int repeat) : onFinished(defaultFunc),_delta(deltaTime),_loop(loop), _repeat(repeat),_status(status)
{
setAnimation(animation);
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

int main(intargc,char* argv[])

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sudo make install

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "We will also use this class to display the Game Over message if it's needed".

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