Chapter 1, Under the Hood – Setting up the Backend, covers the usage of several underlying architectures that will power our game.

Chapter 2, It’s Game Time! – Designing the Project, partakes in actually building and running the game project of the book, using the architectures set up in Chapter 1, Under the Hood – Setting up the Backend.

Chapter 3, Make It Rain! – Building a Particle System, deals with the complexities of implementing an efficient and expansive particle system.

Chapter 4, Have Thy Gear Ready – Building Game Tools, gets the ball rolling on building custom game tools by setting up their backend.

Chapter 5, Filling the Tool Belt – A few More Gadgets, finishes implementing the map editor that can be used to place, edit, and otherwise manipulate map tiles, entities, and particle emitters.

Chapter 6, Adding Some Finishing Touches – Using Shaders, explains and uses the newly re-architected renderer that allows for easy use of shaders, by implementing a day/night cycle in our game.

Chapter 7, One Step Forward, One Level Down – OpenGL Basics, descends into the depths of technicalities of using raw OpenGL, guiding us through rendering basic shapes, texturing them, and creating the means of movement around the world.

Chapter 8, Let There Be Light – An Introduction to Advanced Lighting, introduces and applies the concepts of lighting up our game world in three-dimensions, using normal maps to add the illusion of extra details, and adding specular highlights to create shining surfaces.

Chapter 9, The Speed of Dark – Lighting and Shadows, expands on the lighting engine by implementing dynamic, three-dimensional, point-light shadows being cast in all directions at once.

Chapter 10, A Chapter You Shouldn’t Skip – Final Optimizations, wraps up the book by making our game run many times faster, and providing you with the tools of taking it even further.

 First and foremost, a compiler that supports new C++ standards is required. The actual SFML library is also needed, as it powers the game we’re building. Chapters 7 and up require the newest versions of the GLEW and GLM libraries as well. Any other individual tools that may be used throughout the course of this book have been mentioned in the individual chapters they’re used in.

This book is for beginning game developers, who already have some basic knowledge of SFML, intermediate skills in modern C++, and have already built a game or two on their own, no matter how simple. Knowledge in modern OpenGL is not required, but may be a plus.

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, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive. "

A block of code is set as follows:

class Observer{ 
public: 
  virtual ~Observer(){} 
  virtual void Notify(const Message& l_message) = 0; 
};

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

using Subscribtions = 
  std::unordered_map<EntityMessage,Communicator>;

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: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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