How This Book Is Organized

The book is organized into four parts:

• Part One—Game Programming Fundamentals: Exposes some stuff that you'll want in your game programming toolbox, like a good random number generator. It also introduces the major components of games and how they interact.

• Part Two—Get Your Game Running: You'll find your first meaty game code examples, including user interface code, 2D graphics code, and your main loop.

• Part Three—Building Out Your Game: The tougher code examples are in this section, such as 3D code, special code for Windows games, and some great debugging tools.

• Part Four—Professional Game Production: This section shows what it's like to actually work on games, from scheduling to testing and finally getting your game out the door and into the hands of your players.

Throughout the book you'll see a few insets that are identified by the following icons:

Gotcha:

When you see this icon you'll read about a common mistake that I'm hoping you can avoid. Mostly likely, I didn't, and suffered the consequences.

Best Practice:

This inset is something I do by habit, and it helps me avoid programming trouble. Usually, I learned these tips from someone else who taught me, and I'm passing on the good word.

A Tale from the Pixel Mines:

Working in the Pixel Mines is slang for working on computer games. Since I've worked in the industry since 1990, and I'm a creature of observation, I couldn't help but bring a few tall tales to the book from my game industry experiences. Some tales are taller than others, but believe it or not they all actually happened.