Game Engine Programming Book

hi guys. i recently acquired a copy of beginning game programming sams and have started to work through it. and i thought i would give you a review.

Beginning game programming (sams teach yourself)

at the start the author talks about what you need in a simple game engine, which i thought was helpful as i had never seen an engine before, and then goes on to explain small snippets of the code to you. And how he names his variables and functions which is all good. further through the book he shows us how to implement keyboard and mouse input and joystick movement, which is quite insightful, although one downside is he spends a whole chapter on joystick input, which for beginning game programming i thought was not very helpful. he then shows you how to put a simple "game" together. although it is not actually a game it is more of an animation. it basically shows a blank window with snowflakes appearing in it. This i thought was quite good although there was not much support if the code did not work. For example i had trouble with the resource file (which is basically a file like any you make in VC++ but it provides links to images sprites and other things like that.) The only solution to this problem was too look on the internet in some forums. Fair enough he is teaching us about your first simple graphics program to quite a wide audience, and not everybody in that audience uses VC++ to code. So help was not really expected.

The author goes on further to teach us about simple games. Like the classic game Light Cycles. which utilizes all you have learned so far. and provides quite detailed explanations to certain features.

Final Thought:

Pros:

this book has some promise as it shows you a simple game engine. although i was hoping that they would break this down into a sort of primer and then ask you to build one like C++ primer plus did. But one feature that i liked was how he shows us how to make a wandering game which has a similar feel to Pokemon.

Cons:

the book simply threw you into code to fast. i feel that for a beginner it is easier to digest smaller chunks of code before moving onto a complete game engine. The fact that the game engine isn't explained line by line like other books is a bit of a downer as well. The author also started to go into to much detail about unimportant things. This knowledge is pretty much already know to anyone who plays games and would have been better if it had instead gone into detail about the code itself.

Verdict for Beginners:

Buy it if you want to learn how to make a game engine and build upon it. but a good knowledge of C++ is required Prerequisites i would recommend are C++ primer plus. But this book will not show you how to make 3D games so don't buy it if you think it will. The author recommended to us that Teach yourself game programming with directx in 21 days so that is the next book i will Review :D

talk to you later :D