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A Dash of Game Development – 10. Game Objects.
What are game objects? Simply put, they are the entities that make up your game. A character in a game, a tree which is a part of the game landscape, buildings, walls, sprites, menus, the HUD, platforms, NPCs and mostly everything that you see within a game are all examples of game objects. It would be…
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A Dash of Game Development – 9. Archives and Resource Groups.
In this chapter we take the basic resource management framework we built in the last chapter and add a few more things to it. We will refine our code and make the framework more generic so we can read resources from archives and allow loading of resources via resource groups. (This will allow us to…
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A Dash of Game Development – 8. Resource Management.
In the last chapter we used and shared an image resource between sprites, now we will see how we manage shared resources within our framework. It’s easy to manage a shared resource when you have a single image and handful of sprites using the same image. However, games have a lot of images and even…
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A Dash of Game Development – 7. Images, Sprites and Textures.
We will be looking at a bit of theory again in this chapter. First let’s start with images. An image is often used interchangeably with the terms picture and bitmap. If you recall, we talked about bitmaps in chapter 4 — where we understood what a bitmap was. Images are usually stored on a storage medium in…
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A Dash of Game Development – 6. The Event System.
Now that we have our game framework in object oriented format, it’s time to extend it further so that we can add game entities, load resources and run our game simulations via the framework. Let’s begin by looking at what all needs to be added to our basic game framework. Remember, I am not going…
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A Dash of Game Development – 5. Going Object Oriented.
In the previous chapters we finished with the basic outline of a game. However, this simple outline isn’t going to take us too far when it comes to building a complex interactive game. It’s time we added structure to this outline so that we can build it into something that we can actually use to…
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A Dash of Game Development – 4. Display and Co-ordinate System.
The previous chapter dealt with the general outline of a game and we saw a basic flow of how a game works. We will slowly add more to that but before we move on, a little bit of theory has be looked into. The reason I want to get into this now, is because as…
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A Dash of Game Development – 3. Basic Outline and Our First Animation.
I hope your tool chain is all setup right. In that case we move along and actually write some code. We will use the same code from the earlier chapter and add more things to it as we go along. The code does very little as yet, but our short piece of code (first.py) has…
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A Dash of Game Development – 2. Installation and Setting up.
In the previous chapter we had a brief introduction of the tool-chain we will be using. Now it’s time to set it up for the game we will be developing. So lets begin by first downloading the individual components. Python (version 2.7): http://www.python.org/download/ PySFML (version 1.6): http://www.sfml-dev.org/download.php PyOpenGL (3.0.1): http://pypi.python.org/pypi/PyOpenGL Optionally you can also install GIMP, Paint.NET and Notepad++.…
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A Dash of Game Development – 1. Introduction and Getting Started.
This is the first in the series of chapters that should get you started with game development. But before we begin, let me go over some mandatory introductions and how the following chapters will be organized. This is the first chapter and it focuses on what you need to know and what you can do…