Chapter 6. Polishing the Silver

I'm sure that you are as excited as I am about the progress that you have made on your game. It's almost ready to publish, right? Well, not quite! There is a lot of work that goes into polishing your game before it is ready, and that's what this chapter is all about.

Many people have a great idea for a game, and lots of enthusiastic coders, such as you, actually code their game to the point where we have reached so far. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of projects die. For some reason, many first-time game coders don't take the time to really finish their game. There are lots of things that still need to be done to make your game presentable:

• Game state: We already touched on game state a little bit when you learned how to pause your game. This chapter will continue the discussion of how you use game state to manage your game at various stages of gameplay.
• Splash screen: Most games display one or more screens before the game starts...