Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Generally speaking, C++ is the language of choice for game developers. Any ideal
candidate for the programmer position in a mobile game dev team must be at ease
with such a language and have developed some kind of project with it, even as an
indie game or some school project. He must be proficient with concepts like destruct-
ors, classes, inheritance, constructors, and constants.
Integrated Development Environment is software that allows you to develop code for
projects and games. The development environment of choice for C++ is Microsoft
Visual Studio, a professional tool that offers everything you need to produce high
quality coding, including a code editor, debugger, several development tools to
design GUIs, web apps, classes, data schemes, content exploring tools, and much
more useful stuff.
Game engines may have their own built-in coding IDE, for example, Unity 3D now
comes with a tool named MonoDevelop.
A true IDE is not even always necessary. Many coders, especially when dealing with
scripting languages, such as UScript, are happy enough with text editors, such as
ConText, which offers some basic functions of auto indent and text aligning accord-
ing to a given set of available coding languages, recognized by the software.
Version Control Systems are software used to manage the changes in documents
and computer programs. These software cover a strategic role when more than one
person work on the same part of a project; as it is usually the case for programmers
on a game.
GIT is one of popular, free, and open source Version Control software which you can
use for your projects. You can find it at
http://git-scm.com/
.
Coding departments
The mobile team game programmer has several duties to attend to, mainly because
he basically is in charge of everything involving coding. The list includes, among oth-
ers:
•
Game engine\Physics programming
: The game engine consists of devel-
oping a framework of some sort that can effectively manage everything that
makes a game what it is: graphics, audio, input and controls system, data
saving, networking, and anything else that is necessary. Since there are
