Book Image

Learning Windows 8 Game Development

By : Michael Quandt
Book Image

Learning Windows 8 Game Development

By: Michael Quandt

Overview of this book

With the recent success of a lot of smaller games, game development is quickly becoming a great field to get in to. Mobile and PC games are on the rise, and having a way to create a game for all types of devices without rewriting everything is a huge benefit for the new Windows 8 operating system. In this book, you will learn how to use cutting-edge technologies like DirectX and tools that will make creating a game easy. This book also allows you to make money by selling your games to the world. Learning Windows 8 Game Development teaches you how to create exciting games for tablets and PC on the Windows 8 platform. Make a game, learn the techniques, and use them to make the games you want to play. Learn about graphics, multiplayer options, how to use the Proximity + Socket APIs to add local multiplayer, how to sell the game outright, and In-App Purchases. Learning Windows 8 Game Development guides you from the start of your journey all the way to developing games for Windows by showing you how to develop a game from scratch and sell it in the store.With Learning Windows 8 Game Development, you will learn how to write the code required to set everything up, get some graphics on screen, and then jump into the fun part of adding gameplay to turn a graphics sample into a proper game. From there, you'll look at how to add awesome features to your game like networking, motion controls, and even take advantage of new Windows 8 features like live tiles and sharing to make your players want to challenge their friends and keep playing. This book wraps up by covering the only way a good game can finish development: by shipping the game on the Windows Store. You'll look at the things to remember to make certification painless and some great tips on how to market and sell your game to the public.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Windows 8 Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Appendix A. Adding the Third Dimension

In the previous chapters you have been working on a 2D game, and DirectXTK hides away a lot of the complexity of making a 2D game in a 3D world. Most big-budget modern games make use of 3D instead of 2D for most of the action, to create immersive experiences that in many cases try to look as realistic as possible.

3D itself is not much more complicated than working in 2D; however, because we're working with Direct3D directly now, there is some extra complexity and concepts that you need to learn to understand how everything fits together.

In this appendix we're going to take a crash course in 3D rendering by looking at the different concepts involved, from vertices to shaders, and how they all fit together to put a 3D object on the screen.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Vertices and triangles

  • Indices

  • 3D cameras

  • DirectXMath

  • Buffers

  • Shaders (vertex and pixel)

  • Input layouts

  • Drawing the model

If you've skipped back to this section and aren't familiar with the Direct3D pipeline and how to set it up, be sure to go back and read Chapter 1, Getting Started with Direct3D, before you continue.