Book Image

OpenGL Game Development By Example

By : Stephen Madsen, Robert Madsen
Book Image

OpenGL Game Development By Example

By: Stephen Madsen, Robert Madsen

Overview of this book

OpenGL is one of the most popular rendering SDKs used to develop games. OpenGL has been used to create everything from 3D masterpieces running on desktop computers to 2D puzzles running on mobile devices. You will learn to apply both 2D and 3D technologies to bring your game idea to life. There is a lot more to making a game than just drawing pictures and that is where this book is unique! It provides a complete tutorial on designing and coding games from the setup of the development environment to final credits screen, through the creation of a 2D and 3D game. The book starts off by showing you how to set up a development environment using Visual Studio, and create a code framework for your game. It then walks you through creation of two games–a 2D platform game called Roboracer 2D and a 3D first-person space shooter game–using OpenGL to render both 2D and 3D graphics using a 2D coordinate system. You'll create sprite classes, render sprites and animation, and navigate and control the characters. You will also learn how to implement input, use audio, and code basic collision and physics systems. From setting up the development environment to creating the final credits screen, the book will take you through the complete journey of creating a game engine that you can extend to create your own games.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
OpenGL Game Development By Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Level up!


A lot of the fun in games is trying to increase your score. Part of good game design is to make the game challenging to play, but not so challenging that the player cannot score or improve.

Most players also get better at a game as they play, so if the game difficulty does not increase, the player will eventually get bored because the player will no longer be challenged.

We will start by simply displaying the score on the screen so that the player can see how well they are doing. Then we will discuss techniques that are used to continually increase the difficulty of the game, thus steadily increasing the challenge.

Displaying the score

We already learned how to display text on the screen when we were creating the credits screen. Now, we will use the same techniques to display the score.

If you recall, we already have a mechanism to keep track of the score. Every sprite has a value property. For pickups, we assign a positive value so that the player gains points for each pickup. For...