Summary

This hour introduced you to animation and how it applies to games. As you now know, animation is what makes many forms of modern entertainment work, including movies, television, and video games. Two primary types of animation are used in the development of computer games , and this hour explored how they work and when you would want to use them. If you're a little frustrated that you didn't get to fire up your compiler in this hour , please understand that animation can be a complex topic, so I felt it necessary to lay some conceptual groundwork before diving into a bunch of code. The next two hours provide you with more than enough code to meet your appetite for game programming knowledge as you add support for sprites to the game engine.

Hour 10, "Making Things Move with Sprites," leads you through the development of a sprite class that supports sprite animation in the context of the game engine. I think you'll find the sprite class to be both powerful and intriguing at the same time. Perhaps more importantly, it opens the door for the creation of some exciting games.