It Is What Got Me Started

So now that I have finished with the tutorials, time to give a bit of a sum up of my experiences at Lazy Foo' Productions. I found the site though various iterations of google searches. Between "Game Design Tutorials" and "Game Graphic Programing" it seemed to pop up a few times. So with a few clicks and away I went.

My first hurdle was getting used to working with Visual Studio 2010. It just released and I decided to jump right in with the express version. So it took some time to figure out how best to download and configure the SDL libraries. But that was not a fault of the tutorials. If anything they did a good job of showing me where I would need to set things in Visual Studio.

So here I am ready to become a master game programmer and this site will tell me how to do it. Aside from his tutorials, he does have a nice set of article as well and from this one on Starting out in Game Development he had a very nice idea bout "Jumping In." It is worth the read so I will not quote it here. But I do still have a hint a fish about me.

The tutorials gave a very nice overview of basic gaming mechanics and how the SDL library can help solve them. The code provided is very useful and I have based a good deal of my personal libraries on his work. In his examples everything is in one large source file and he makes use of many of his structures being global. So as a personal exercise, I broke classes out to their own header and code files as well as relying more on passing information by reference then by using global variables.

At this point I have heavily modified most of what he presented for my own use. Though I do need to give him credit for the Timer class. I think I will be using that almost exactly as presented, except for a few typographical changes for my own personal style and variable notation.

The information presented definitely gave me enough tools get started on my own projects. It starts with just the quick basic screen drawing and image mapping. Then gets in to topics of collision detection, camera panning, scrolling and other basic gaming topics. There was some advanced items on multi-treading that I did not review since that is an advanced topic in general programing let alone game programing.

The tutorials gave me some context to start going though the various SDL documentation and see what else I will be able to do and create. I am at this point ready to start my first design project and see where I end up.