What this book covers

Chapter 1, Under the Hood – Setting up the Backend, covers the usage of several underlying architectures that will power our game.

Chapter 2, It’s Game Time! – Designing the Project, partakes in actually building and running the game project of the book, using the architectures set up in Chapter 1, Under the Hood – Setting up the Backend.

Chapter 3, Make It Rain! – Building a Particle System, deals with the complexities of implementing an efficient and expansive particle system.

Chapter 4, Have Thy Gear Ready – Building Game Tools, gets the ball rolling on building custom game tools by setting up their backend.

Chapter 5, Filling the Tool Belt – A few More Gadgets, finishes implementing the map editor that can be used to place, edit, and otherwise manipulate map tiles, entities, and particle emitters.

Chapter 6, Adding Some Finishing Touches – Using Shaders, explains and uses the newly re-architected renderer that allows for easy use of shaders, by implementing a day/night cycle in our game.

Chapter 7, One Step Forward, One Level Down – OpenGL Basics, descends into the depths of technicalities of using raw OpenGL, guiding us through rendering basic shapes, texturing them, and creating the means of movement around the world.

Chapter 8, Let There Be Light – An Introduction to Advanced Lighting, introduces and applies the concepts of lighting up our game world in three-dimensions, using normal maps to add the illusion of extra details, and adding specular highlights to create shining surfaces.

Chapter 9, The Speed of Dark – Lighting and Shadows, expands on the lighting engine by implementing dynamic, three-dimensional, point-light shadows being cast in all directions at once.

Chapter 10, A Chapter You Shouldn’t Skip – Final Optimizations, wraps up the book by making our game run many times faster, and providing you with the tools of taking it even further.