Pc game programing tutorial

The dynamic display , on the other hand, is the screen which is governed by the player's actions i. What options are available to the player on the game startup? This describes what options are on the menu, how and where it appears on what screen, how the player gets there, and how he gets out. What does the screen looks like at the beginning of the game, what are the startup parameters, where are the characters, etc?

What messages, if any are on screen, and where? Intro music? Since the dynamic screen vary as per the input given by the player, their descriptions are too many to be listed here. Some examples:. These screens include messages and responses to questions like: What happens when the player loses? What happens when the player wins? What happens when the player get the high score? Where does the player go when the game is over?

How does he start a new game? This step involves developing a proper logic for gameplay. This requires the game-programmer to answer many questions in the form of program-code. These questions include: How is game played? What are the controls? What is the Game Goal? How is the player going to achieve the game goal? In other words, we must say that since game represents an event-driven situation, the game-programmer i.

While writing a game program, after selecting the goal-of-game, one needs to determine its initial requirements. For instance, to write a game program for guessing a number, you need to decide about a way to generate the number, number of players involved, number of chances allowed to the player, a scoring methodology etc.

Here we are not aiming at making you a professional game programmer, rather we are concentrating more at giving you an idea of writing simple or elementary game programs. General Description of Game: The general description of a game involves the general overview of the game, how it works, what happens on each level, etc.

It describes all parts of the game from the player's perspective:. Developing logic for the scoring purposes is a subset of developing logic for the game play. For this, you must first decide the scoring policy that you're going to follow in your game. You're going to decide the maximum number of chances allowed, the scoring mechanism, whether it is tied to time or not, etc.

During this phase, the milestone events are worked out and accordingly scoring positively or negatively is carried out. Every once in a while, the player needs to be rewarded or penalized somehow for reaching that point in the game.

Each of these places where something special happens is called a Milestone Event. There are a gauge to let the player know he's on the right or wrong track, and will encourage or discourage him to keep going.

Now that we have discussed these different phases in game-development, let us not develop a simple tic-tac-toe game. Now let us analyze different elements of the game design in the program that we're going to make. It's a two player game, so we need two variables to store their names and run a loop to ask for the player to enter their move turn by turn.

So we need another variable to store the turn to see which player is to enter the move. Here are the variables:. We need a function to handle the navigation to the boxes when the player presses arrow keys and hit the Enter button to enter his move in the box. We need another variable to track the current box the player is on at the movement. An array to store the values entered by the player. So here are the variables:. Here in this function, char a[3][3] is the array that holds the moves.

Another variable is required to count the number of turns. There are nine boxes in total however the number of turns maybe more than nine because if the player tries to enter his move into a box that's already taken, then the chance passes over to the other player.

We need a function to put the move into the box chosen by the player and we need to make sure that we don't overwrite the value in a box:. I often see people work on the area of a postage stamp not just when programming due to all the toolbars: this layout prevents that. The one thing we are missing is two drop-down boxes OK, so two things. Now click on Add Command , select the Build category, and choose the Solution Configurations command.

This adds the drop-down box to the left of your menu bar; click the Move Down button a few times, until it is all the way to the right. Repeat this for the Solution Platforms command. Your solution explorer should be totally clean now. Then click the Add button. Enter the following program:. You can start the program by hitting F5.

Visual Studio will ask you if you want to build the program; you want this so click yes. Press Enter while the console window has the keyboard focus to close the console window. When you start this application, you will see that you created it yourself. A project can have multiple source files, and a solution can have multiple projects.

Other files:. Quite confusing perhaps, but all that matters right now is the. It is always good to understand what each file is for — especially when it comes to working out which ones you need on GitHub or Perforce hint: Never commit compiler generated content to version control!

To change this setting, open the Windows control panel and go to File Explorer Options , then the select the View tab, and select the Show hidden files, folders, and drives radio button. Keep in mind you will want to install Visual Studio and programming projects on your fastest storage device — a super fast Solid State Drive SSD is preferred! Some people even go crazy and use RAM disks for their projects.

This might not matter now but when you are hitting tens of thousands of Lines of Code LOCs it will save you a lot of time. Even an empty project will create enough directories anyway. The indexing services will have a negative impact on the performance of the build process and for this reason, it is recommended to save your projects in a folder that is not being indexed by the indexing service.