Game Programming - Class One

• The basics

• We will be looking at programming for real-time interactive games
• We will start at a top level
  • (Re)view the highest-level main stages of a game implementation
  • Do a tutorial for a simple game, that focuses many key concepts

• Initialization

• Game Loop

• Finalization

• Configuration
• Sub-system initialization and configuration
• Resource Loading
• Pre-computations
• Overall setup

• Update
  • Input handling
  • Simulations/animation parameters
  • Network
  • Audio
• Draw
  • As fast as possible

(in these you may have embedded level/stage control, GUI interface/menus,etc.)

• Save relevant game state/configuration
• Terminate network connections
• Overall Clean shutdown of the system

• Create a simple version of Pong, step by step, using XNA
• Goals:
  • Draw attention to key concepts of game programming
  • Introduce a new platform: C#/XNA
  • Have fun

• Syntax very similar to C++
• Main differences can be found in Moodle Resources
• For the tutorial at hand, familiarity with C++ is enough
• Available from Microsoft Visual C# Express Edition (see Moodle Resources)
• In Linux you can try Mono (no support here yet, sorry)

• Using version 3.1
• Installed over Visual C#/Visual Studio 2008
• Works over Microsoft .NET 3.5
• Provides a framework with a series of components that abstract hardware and simplify many common tasks
• In Linux you can try MonoXNA (no support here yet, sorry)