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...

Spawning bullets

We need a way to spawn bullets from both the player and each of the invaders. The solutions to both are very similar but not identical. We need a way to allow GameInputHandler to spawn bullets when a keyboard key or gamepad button is pressed, and we need InvaderUpdateComponent to use its already existing logic to spawn bullets.

The GameScreen class has a vector holding all the GameObject instances, so GameScreen is the ideal candidate to move a bullet into position and set it moving up or down the screen, depending on who or what triggered the shot. We need a way for the GameInputHandler class and InvaderUpdateComponenet to communicate with the GameScreen class, but we also need to restrict the communication to just spawning bullets; we don't want them to be able to take control of any other part of the GameScreen class.

Let's code an abstract class that GameScreen can inherit from.

Coding the BulletSpawner class

Create a new header file in the...