Condition checking in games is all about making decisions. How do we know the player has run out of lives? How do we detect the ball has reached the edge of the screen and needs to bounce back the other way? C++ has the keyword which we can use to code our […]
We have seen in the last tutorial how we can detect certain conditions in our C++ code. For example when the player loses a life, destroys an alien or gets a new fastest time. We have also seen the C++ keyword that allows us to execute a certain block of code when a particular condition or […]
Loops might sound a bit odd at first? They are a way of executing parts of our C++ code more than once, looping over code until we have the result we want or a test is done. This can simply mean doing the same thing until the code being looped over prompts the loop to end or it could […]
Functions are a really vital part of C++. They serve a number of, well, functions. They allow us to make our code more readable and manageable by splitting it up into parts, called functions. They also allow us to avoid duplicating our code. For example, if there is something we need to do more than […]
Object Oriented Programming OOP, is how most programming is done these days. While it is possible to code a game without using it and many games in the past were, even the most simple game projects will benefit greatly from using OOP. So what exactly is it and how do we get started using OOP? […]
C++ arrays do exactly what their name implies. They allow us to handle whole arrays of data in one simple structure. Certainly, there is quite a bit to learn about arrays but actually they are very straight forward as we we will see.
What exactly, is an array?
If a variable is a box in […]
When we pass values to a function or return values from a function that is exactly what we are doing. Passing or returning a value. What happens is that a copy of the variable’s value is made, and sent into the function where it is used. Nothing happens to the actual variable itself. C++ references […]
Pointers have a bad reputation. They can appear complicated or convoluted. Add to this, the way pointers can be used in C++ code has evolved in recent years. I believe the best way to understand them is to use them in their original (old-fashioned) form. You can’t understand how an internal combustion engine works if […]
Now that we have a working development environment we can go ahead and configure a project and write some code that actually does something. For the sake of actually seeing SFML in action we will write some code but we will not learn about each and every line of it. Rather we will improve our […]
This is the very first project on the road to building games for desktop operating systems like Windows, Linux and Mac. In these really simple steps we will walk through the process of installing the software applications that we need to start to learn to code for these desktop OS’s.
Getting started
Before we can practice […]
