Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
3
Game Development 101
Game development is hard—not so much because it's rocket science, but because there's a
huge amount of information to digest before you can actually start writing the game of your
dreams. On the programming side, you have to worry about such mundane things as file
input/output (I/O), user input handling, audio and graphics programming, and networking
code. And those are only the basics! On top of that, you will want to build your actual game
mechanics. The code for that needs structure as well, and it is not always obvious how to
create the architecture of your game. You'll actually have to decide how to make your game
world move. Can you get away with not using a physics engine and instead roll your own simple
simulation code? What are the units and scale within which your game world is set? How does it
translate to the screen?
There's actually another problem many beginners overlook, which is that, before you start
hacking away, you'll actually have to design your game first. Countless projects never see the
light of day and get stuck in the tech-demo phase because there was never any clear idea of
how the game should actually behave. And we're not talking about the basic game mechanics of
your average first-person shooter. That's the easy part: WASD keys for movement plus mouse,
and you're done. You should ask yourself questions like: Is there a splash screen? What does it
transition to? What's on the main menu screen? What head-up display elements are available
on the actual game screen? What happens if I press the pause button? What options should be
offered on the settings screen? How will my UI design work out on different screen sizes and
aspect ratios?
The fun part is that there's no silver bullet; there's no standard way to approach all these
questions. We will not pretend to give you the be-all and end-all solution to developing games.
Instead, we'll try to illustrate how we usually approach the design of a game. You may decide to
adapt it completely or modify it to better fit your needs. There are no rules—whatever works for
you is OK. You should, however, always strive for an easy solution, both in code and on paper.
Genres: To Each One's Taste
At the start of your project, you usually decide on the genre to which your game will belong.
Unless you come up with something completely new and previously unseen, chances are high
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