Book Image

SFML Game Development By Example

By : Raimondas Pupius
Book Image

SFML Game Development By Example

By: Raimondas Pupius

Overview of this book

Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) is a simple interface comprising five modules, namely, the audio, graphics, network, system, and window modules, which help to develop cross-platform media applications. By utilizing the SFML library, you are provided with the ability to craft games quickly and easily, without going through an extensive learning curve. This effectively serves as a confidence booster, as well as a way to delve into the game development process itself, before having to worry about more advanced topics such as “rendering pipelines” or “shaders.” With just an investment of moderate C++ knowledge, this book will guide you all the way through the journey of game development. The book starts by building a clone of the classical snake game where you will learn how to open a window and render a basic sprite, write well-structured code to implement the design of the game, and use the AABB bounding box collision concept. The next game is a simple platformer with enemies, obstacles and a few different stages. Here, we will be creating states that will provide custom application flow and explore the most common yet often overlooked design patterns used in game development. Last but not the least, we will create a small RPG game where we will be using common game design patterns, multiple GUI. elements, advanced graphical features, and sounds and music features. We will also be implementing networking features that will allow other players to join and play together. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in using the SFML library to its full potential.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
SFML Game Development By Example
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing sprite sheets


First, let's whet your appetite by looking into the future of using sprite sheets, which allow you to create animations that look like this:

From our previous experience with SFML, we know that a sprite is essentially an image that can be moved around, cropped, scaled, and rotated just to mention a few options. A sprite sheet, on the other hand, is a texture that contains multiple sprites. From the image above, you can see the player is moving left and his animation is progressing. Each frame of the player's animation is stored in a sprite sheet, which is being accessed and cropped in order to represent a single sprite. This is what a small part of it looks like as a texture:

The way sprites are laid out can differ from game to game. It depends on the size constraints of a particular project, as well as the specifics of game-play. The format of the sprite sheet above is just what works the best here and is by no means the "perfect design."

Why would we want to use...