Programming Games Starts Now

Installed all my libraries and ready to start making games again!  Visit my library page and consider using them as well to greatly reduce your time in game development.  Graphics are what most people first think about when they jump into game development.  Quite to the contrary, graphics are not a game, they are simple images animated to tell a story or represent a past event.  A game however is about the future that you control.  Animation in unison with your actions.  A “game” can be 15 seconds of fun that is be repeated and enjoyed over and over again.  I grew up on very simple arcade games.  Simple in the terms or graphics and sounds, but I enjoyed them for hours and days competing with my family and friends to set the next high score.  Consider just one, the classics Popeye game that was a regular cartoon show on TV turned playable game on arcade machines and consoles:

I use to spend the equivalent of man years developing the graphics of my games and turning out only a handful of 50% complete works every 2 or 3 years.  As simple as Popeye is, my effort never yield a completed game as simple as it except once.  All my games were developed on Windows with DirectX graphics API.  The first was DirectX 2 and the last was DirectX 10.  I am not writing DirectX graphics engine code anymore, at least not from scratch.   Starting over with DirectX 12 just does not appeal to me and especially since Microsoft “dumbed it down” requiring a low level approach to memory handling and control of the graphics pipeline.  That provides flexibility and speed to give the next cutting edge, real time graphics engine to power today’s modern games.  But for my purposes, I don’t expect that I will create the latest and greatest special effect or AAA title.  Instead, I will use a graphics engine that Microsoft has released as open source on Git hub.  In fact, Git hub is a huge resource to hobbyist programmers like myself.  Always review the licenses in which the libraries are released to use in your own work.  But, for most purposes and even commercial use, you will find many libraries ready to use that are as good or better than what you will spend your man years of labor creating and free to use as you please.

With my time, I plan to write games and build a frame work of code in C++.  I will write code and share it here.  I will follow the object oriented model mostly with reusable code to be used in many titles.  The frame work will focus on game objects and moving them through 3D space, collision detection, real time physics, special path finding, AI, level building and multiplayer.  That is enough for one person to handle by himself without doing all the low level and even high level special effects already done for us in open source code.

If you are interested in writing your own games and know some C++, follow me and steal from my code to write your first or next game title.  If you have never written in C++ I suggest you buy a book and practice writing tiny code snippets and learn the art of programming before you jump into a dedicated project.  Then, down load the libraries from Git hub and subscribe to this blog.  The next post I write I will introduce you to a game frame work I plan to develop using those libraries and we can together start writing beautiful games and concentrate on bring mine and your ideas for 15 seconds of fun to life!