Book Image

Beginning C++ Game Programming - Second Edition

By : John Horton
Book Image

Beginning C++ Game Programming - Second Edition

By: John Horton

Overview of this book

The second edition of Beginning C++ Game Programming is updated and improved to include the latest features of Visual Studio 2019, SFML, and modern C++ programming techniques. With this book, you’ll get a fun introduction to game programming by building five fully playable games of increasing complexity. You’ll learn to build clones of popular games such as Timberman, Pong, a Zombie survival shooter, a coop puzzle platformer and Space Invaders. The book starts by covering the basics of programming. You’ll study key C++ topics, such as object-oriented programming (OOP) and C++ pointers, and get acquainted with the Standard Template Library (STL). The book helps you learn about collision detection techniques and game physics by building a Pong game. As you build games, you’ll also learn exciting game programming concepts such as particle effects, directional sound (spatialization), OpenGL programmable shaders, spawning objects, and much more. Finally, you’ll explore game design patterns to enhance your C++ game programming skills. By the end of the book, you’ll have gained the knowledge you need to build your own games with exciting features from scratch
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
23
Chapter 23: Before You Go...

Managing the code files

One of the advantages of abstraction using classes and functions is that the length (number of lines) of our code files can be reduced. Even though we will be using more than a dozen code files for this project, the length of the code in ZombieArena.cpp will still get a little unwieldy toward the end. In the final project, Space Invaders++, we will look at even more ways to abstract and manage our code.

For now, use this tip to keep things manageable. Notice that on the left-hand side of the code editor in Visual Studio, there are several + and - signs, one of which is shown in this diagram:

There will be one sign for each block (if, while, for, and so on) of the code. You can expand and collapse these blocks by clicking on the + and - signs. I recommend keeping all the code not currently under discussion collapsed. This will make things much clearer.

Furthermore, we can create our own collapsible blocks. I suggest making a...