Hour 8. Example Game: Brainiac

What good is a game book without any games ? I have to admit to feeling kind of bad for spending seven lessons getting you primed for game programming. I'd loved to have hit you with a complete game in the first lesson, but you'd probably ended up wanting to hit me. The reality is that it's taken seven lessons to give you enough knowledge for you to create a complete game, which is the purpose of this lesson. In this lesson, you create a tile game called Brainiac that is similar to the classic Concentration memory game in which you match pairs of hidden tiles. Okay, so the game isn't quite a 3D shoot-em-up, but it is a complete game that you can show off to your buddies . In fact, you can plug in your own tile images to customize the game with pictures of your friends and family.

In this hour, you'll learn

How to dream up the concept for a new game
How to take a game concept and turn it into a game design
How to use the game engine and a game design to build a working game from scratch
That testing a game is the best part of the game development process