This journey will be smooth as we will learn about the fundamentals of the super-fast C++ language one step at a time, and then put this new knowledge to use by adding cool features to the five games we are going to build.

The following are our five projects for this book.

Timber!!!

The first game is an addictive, fast-paced clone of the hugely successful Timberman, which can be found at http://store.steampowered.com/app/398710/. Our game, Timber!!!, will introduce us to all the basics of C++ while we build a genuinely playable game. Here is what our version of the game will look like when we are done and we have added a few last-minute enhancements:

Pong

Pong was one of the first video games to be made, and you can find out about its history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong. It is an excellent example of how the basics of game object animation and dynamic collision detection work. We will build this simple retro game to explore the concept of classes and object-oriented programming. The player will use the bat at the bottom of the screen and hit the ball back to the top of the screen:

Zombie Arena

Next, we will build a frantic, zombie survival shooter, not unlike the Steam hit Over 9,000 Zombies!, which you can find out more about at http://store.steampowered.com/app/273500/. The player will have a machine gun and must fight off ever-growing waves of zombies. All this will take place in a randomly generated, scrolling world. To achieve this, we will learn about how object-oriented programming allows us to have a large code base (lots of code) that is easy to write and maintain. Expect exciting features such as hundreds of enemies, rapid-fire weaponry, pickups, and a character that can be “leveled up” after each wave:

Thomas was late

The fourth game will be a stylish and challenging single-player and co-op puzzle platformer. It is based on the very popular game Thomas was Alone (http://store.steampowered.com/app/220780/). Expect to learn about cool topics such as particle effects, OpenGL Shaders, and split-screen cooperative multiplayer:

Tip

If you want to play any of the games now, you can do so from the download bundle in the Runnable Games folder. Just double-click on the appropriate .exe file. Note that, in this folder, you can run either the completed games or any game in its partially completed state from any chapter.

Space Invaders ++

The final game will be a Space Invaders clone. In some ways, the game itself is not what is important about this project. The project will be used to learn about game programming patterns. As will become abundantly clear as this book progresses, our code keeps getting longer and more complicated. Each project will introduce one or more techniques for coping with this, but the complexity and length of our code will keep coming back to challenge us, despite these techniques.

The Space Invaders project (called Space Invaders ++) will show us ways in which we can radically reorganize our game code also that we can take control of and properly manage our code once and for all. This will leave you with all the knowledge you need to plan and build deep, complex, and innovative games, without ending up in a tangle of code.

The game will also introduce concepts such as screens, input handlers, and entity-component systems. It will also allow us to learn how to let the player use a gamepad instead of the keyboard and introduce the C++ concepts of smart pointers, casts, assertions, breakpoint debugging, and teach us the most important lesson from the whole book: how to build your own unique games:

Let’s get started by introducing C++, Visual Studio, and SFML!

Now that we know what games we will be building, let’s get started by introducing C++, Visual Studio, and SFML. One question you might have is, why use the C++ language at all? C++ is fast – very fast. What makes this true is the fact that the code that we write is directly translated into machine-executable instructions. These instructions are what make the game. The executable game is contained within a .exe file, which the player can simply double-click to run.

There are a few steps in the process of changing our code into an executable file. First, the preprocessor looks to see if any other code needs to be included within our own code and adds it. Next, all the code is compiled into object files by the compiler program. Finally, a third program, called the linker, joins all the object files into the executable file for our game.

In addition, C++ is well established at the same time as being extremely up to date. C++ is an object-oriented programming (OOP) language, which means we can write and organize our code using well-tested conventions that make our games efficient and manageable. The benefits as well as the necessity of this will reveal themselves as we progress through this book.

Most of this other code that I referred to, as you might be able to guess, is SFML, and we will find out more about SFML in just a minute. The preprocessor, compiler, and linker programs I have just mentioned are all part of the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).