Introduction

In this chapter, we will cover the basic concepts that you need to know to kick-start your career in game development.

The first step before a person starts coding is to install an integrated development environment (IDE). Nowadays, there are a few online IDEs that are available, but we are going to use an offline standalone IDE, Visual Studio. The next most important thing that many programmers do not start using at an early stage is revision control software.

Revision control software helps to back up the code in one central location; it has a historical overview of the changes that are made, which you can access and revert to if needed, and it also helps to resolve conflicts between files that have been worked on by different programmers at the same time.

The most useful feature of C++, in my opinion, is memory handling. It gives the developers a lot of control over how memory must be assigned depending on the current usage and needs of the program. As a result of this, we can allocate memory when there is a need and deallocate it accordingly.

If we do not de-allocate memory, we might run out of memory very soon, especially if we are using recursion. Sometimes there is a need to convert from one datatype to another to prevent loss of data, to pass the correct datatype in a function, and so on. C++ provides us a few ways by which we can do those castings.

The recipes in this chapter will primarily focus on these topics and deal with practical ways to implement them.