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...

Adding a time-bar

Since time is a crucial mechanism in the game, it is necessary to keep the player aware of it. They need to know if their allotted six seconds are about to run out. It will give them a sense of urgency as the end of the game draws near and a sense of accomplishment if they perform well enough to maintain or increase their remaining time.

Drawing the number of seconds remaining on the screen is not easy to read (when concentrating on the branches), nor is it a particularly interesting way to achieve the objective.

What we need is a time-bar. Our time-bar will be a simple red rectangle that's prominently displayed on the screen. It will start off nice and wide, but rapidly shrink as time runs out. When the player's remaining time reaches zero, the time-bar will be gone completely.

At the same time as adding the time-bar, we will add the necessary code to keep track of the player's remaining time, and respond when it runs out. Let's go through...