Game Programming Essentials: Overview

Hello All,
Today, I’m beginning a series of articles to try to scratch an itch which has been occurring this semester in my game programming classes. The following are questions from my students:







All the above questions are in effect the same kind of question:

• “How do I write my game?”
• “How do I organise my game code?”
• “How do I code up the game logic?”

Despite the last question saying its a DirectX question, its a more general, more fundamental question than that.  All these questions could be asked for any kind of game in any programming language.

So, here is what this series will be about:

• Basic game programming techniques:
• Not graphics, not networking, just the basics
• No particular language:
• General bias to C++/C#/Java syntax
• But its mainly pseudo code
• No working examples, just idea snippets
• You will have to convert them to your own programming language/game engine
• Common ideas, but trying to give as many applications as possible:
• The same code for a homing missile could be misused to a simple RTS movement

That’s this idea, let’s get coding:

Mark