Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours

Product Description

Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours demystifies game programming by providing clear, practical lessons using C/C++, the industry standard in game programming. The book focuses on the Windows API to construct games for the Windows platform and discusses game theory, including double-buffered graphics, sprite animation, and digitized sound effects and music. A fully functional game engine provides readers with the ability to create their own future games.

Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #269462 in Books
* Published on: 2003-01-03
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 512 pages

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours demystifies game programming by providing clear, practical lessons using C/C++, the industry standard in game programming. The book focuses on the Windows API to construct games for the Windows platform and discusses game theory, including double-buffered graphics, sprite animation, and digitized sound effects and music. A fully functional game engine provides readers with the ability to create their own future games.

About the Author

Michael Morrison is a writer, developer, toy inventor, and author of a variety of computer technology books and interactive Web-based courses. In addition to his primary profession as a writer and freelance nerd for hire, Michael is the creative lead at Stalefish Labs, an entertainment company he co-founded with his wife, Masheed. The first commercial debut for Stalefish Labs is a traditional social/trivia game called Tall Tales: The Game of Myths, Legends, and Creative One-Upmanship (http://www.talltalesgame.com/). When not glued to his computer, playing hockey, skateboarding, or watching movies with his wife, Michael enjoys hanging out by his koi pond. You can visit Michael on the Web at http://www.michaelmorrison.com/.

Customer Reviews

You will learn game programming, kind of, but mostly Mike Morrison's game engine.2
I gave this book 2 stars, because it has some good points, mostly really bad points.

The good:
You will be able to make basic 2D sprite games in Windows using this book and the source code on the CD. It encourages you to learn basic techniques involved with the other aspects of game development (sound, music, etc). The book comes with several games that you can run right off the CD.

The bad:
This book doesn't really teach you much. In other Sam's Teach Yourself books, you learn each step of what you are doing, and you can put in the source code yourself. In this one, you merely read about PIECES of the source code, and are expected to run it off the disk. So basically, you are paying for a game engine, a bunch of source code examples, and a tutorial on using the game engine.

I would have enjoyed this book much more if it had spent time explaining exactly what the engine does and how to make it do it, not to mention how the code in your program interacts with the engine. It seems to me that this book is mostly for people who want to "cheat" and copy and paste the code to make their games, rather than understanding what they are doing and writing the code themselves. Since I was someone who wanted the latter, I was sorely disappointed.

What's the audience?3
As far as I can tell, this book is for the beginner. It teaches game programming using C++ and the Win32 API. However, you need a lot of C++ experience before you start this book, so read up. This book also moves at an odd pace. By chapter 3, you're designing a game engine, but then you spend almost the entire book learning to draw sprites and animate them, with a few breaks for input and sound. This book does manage to make acomplishments in some areas where other books fail. You actually create more than one game, whereas other books simply throw a lot of demos at you and culminate in a game. Some topics that I haven't seen anywhere else yet are also covered here, like basic AI, keeping hi-scores, etc. Summary: good if you have a knowledge of DOS C++ and want to get into game programming with the Win32 API, but you may just want to skip this book all together and go straight for DirectX.

What's the audience?3
As far as I can tell, this book is for the beginner. It teaches game programming using C++ and the Win32 API. However, you need a lot of C++ experience before you start this book, so read up. This book also moves at an odd pace. By chapter 3, you're designing a game engine, but then you spend almost the entire book learning to draw sprites and animate them, with a few breaks for input and sound. This book does manage to make acomplishments in some areas where other books fail. You actually create more than one game, whereas other books simply throw a lot of demos at you and culminate in a game. Some topics that I haven't seen anywhere else yet are also covered here, like basic AI, keeping hi-scores, etc. Summary: good if you have a knowledge of DOS C++ and want to get into game programming with the Win32 API, but you may just want to skip this book all together and go straight for DirectX.