As these steps are quite intricate, I will cover them in a new list of steps. At this stage, you should have the Timber Property Pages window open, as shown in the preceding screenshot at the end of the previous section.
Now, we will begin to configure some properties while using the following annotated screenshot for guidance:. We will add some fairly intricate and important project settings in this section. This is the laborious part, but we will only need to do this once per project. The special type of file I am referring to is a header file. Note that the header files are distinct from the main source code files and they are contained in files with the.
All this will become clearer when we eventually start adding our own header files in the second project. In the Timber Property Pages window, perform the following three steps, which are numbered in the preceding screenshot:. We have successfully configured Visual Studio and can move on to planning the Timber!!!
Whenever you make a game, it is always best to start with a pencil and paper. If you feel your budget can stretch to it, then grab a copy and give it a play.
The features and objects of a game that define the gameplay are known as the mechanics. The basic mechanics of the game are as follows:. So, in a nutshell, the player must frantically chop to gain points and avoid running out of time.
As a slightly perverse, but fun consequence, the faster they chop, the more likely their squishy demise is. We now know what the game looks like, how it is played, and the motivation behind the game mechanics.
Now, we can go ahead and start building it. Follow these steps:. The project is now set up and ready to go. You will be able to see the following screen.
I have annotated this screenshot so you can start familiarizing yourself with Visual Studio. We will revisit all these areas, and others, soon:. Take the time to locate the Solution Explorer window on the right and adjust it to make its content nice and clear, like it is in the previous screenshot. We will be back here soon to start coding. But first, we will explore the project assets we will be using.
All the graphics and sounds that are required for this game are included in the download bundle for this book. The font that is required has not been supplied. This is because I wanted to avoid any possible ambiguity regarding the license.
This will not cause a problem, though, as I will show you exactly where and how to choose and download fonts for yourself.
Although I will provide either the assets themselves or information on where to get them, you might like to create or acquire them for yourself. There are a number of websites that allow you to contract artists, sound engineers, and even programmers. One of the biggest is Upwork www. You can join this site for free and post your jobs.
You will need to write a clear explanation of your requirements, as well as state how much you are prepared to pay. Then, you will probably get a good selection of contractors bidding to do the work. Be aware, however, that there are a lot of unqualified contractors whose work might be disappointing, but if you choose carefully, you will likely find a competent, enthusiastic, and great-value person or company to do the job.
Sound effects can be downloaded for free from sites such as Freesound www. Another option is to use an open source software called BFXR from www. Once you have decided which assets you will use, it is time to add them to the project.
Where you are using your own, simply replace the appropriate sound or graphic file with your own, using exactly the same filename:. The graphical assets make up the parts of the scene that is our Timber!!! If you take a look at the graphical assets, it should be clear where in our game they will be used:.
The sound files are all in. These files contain the sound effects that we will play at certain events throughout the game.
They were all generated using BFXR and are as follows:. We have seen all the assets, including the graphics, so now we will have a short discussion related to the resolution of the screen and how we position the graphics on it.
All the images that we see on our monitors are made out of pixels. Pixels are little tiny dots of light that combine to make the images we see.
There are many different resolutions of monitor but, as an example, consider that a fairly typical gaming monitor might have 1, pixels horizontally and 1, pixels vertically.
The pixels are numbered, starting from the top left of the screen. As you can see from the following diagram, our 1, x 1, example is numbered from 0 through to 1, on the horizontal x axis and 0 through 1, on the vertical y axis:.
A specific and exact screen location can therefore be identified by an x and y coordinate. We create our games by drawing the game objects such as the background, characters, bullets, and text to specific locations on the screen. These locations are identified by the coordinates of the pixels. Take a look at the following hypothetical example of how we might draw at the approximately central coordinates of the screen.
In the case of a 1, x screen, this would be at the , position:. In addition to the screen coordinates, our game objects will each have their own similar coordinate system as well. Like the screen coordinate system, their internal or local coordinates start at 0,0 in the top left-hand corner.
A visual, 2D game object, such as a character or perhaps a zombie, is called a Sprite. A sprite is typically made from an image file. All sprites have what is known as an origin. If we draw a sprite to a specific location on the screen, it is the origin that will be located at this specific location.
The 0,0 coordinates of the sprite are its origin. The following image demonstrates this:. Therefore, in the image showing the character drawn to the screen, although we drew the image at the central position , , it appears off to the right and down a bit. This is important to know as it will help us understand the coordinates we use to draw all the graphics.
Note that, in the real world, gamers have a huge variety of screen resolutions, and our games will need to work with as many of them as possible. In the third project, we will see how we can make our games dynamically adapt to almost any resolution. In this first project, we will need to assume that the screen resolution is 1, x 1, If your screen resolution is higher, this will be fine.
The code files are nearly identical apart from adding and swapping a few lines of code near the beginning. If you have a lower-resolution screen, then simply follow the code in this book, which assumes that you have a 1, x 1, resolution.
When it comes to trying out the game, you can copy and paste the code files from the low res folder in the first five chapters as appropriate. In fact, once the extra lines have been added from this first chapter, all the rest of the code will be identical, regardless of your screen resolution. I have supplied the low-resolution code for each chapter, just as a convenience. How the few lines of code work their magic scale the screen will be discussed in the third project.
The alternative code will work on resolutions as low as x and so should be OK on almost any PC or laptop. Open up the Timber!!! Find the Solution Explorer window on the right-hand side. Locate the Timber. Delete the entire contents of the code window and add the following code so that you have the same code yourself.
You can do so in the same way that you would with any text editor or word processor; you could even copy and paste it if you prefer. After you have made the edits, we can talk about it:.
As such, this line of code does nothing. It is used to leave in any information that we might find useful when we come back to the code at a later date. The comment ends at the end of the line, so anything on the next line is not part of the comment. There is another type of comment called a multi-line or c-style comment, which can be used to leave comments that take up more than a single line.
We will see some of them later in this chapter. Throughout this book, I will leave hundreds of comments to help add context and further explain the code. An int is an integer or whole number. Hold that thought and we will come back to it in a minute. The main part is the name of the section of code that follows.
We call a section of code like this a function. As we progress through this book, eventually, our games will have many code files. We will discuss them further in Chapter 4 , Loops, Arrays, Switches, Enumerations, and Functions — Implementing Game Mechanics , when we get to see functions in a whole new and more interesting light. We can see that, inside Main , there is just one single line of code, return 0;. This is useful because it can help us prepare to write code that is easy to read and distinguished from other parts of our code.
First, notice that return 0; is indented to the right by one tab. This clearly marks it out as being internal to the main function. As our code grows in length, we will see that indenting our code and leaving white space will be essential to maintaining readability.
Next, notice the punctuation on the end of the line. A semicolon ; tells the compiler that it is the end of the instruction and that whatever follows it is a new instruction. However, not starting a new line for each statement will lead to desperately hard-to-read code, and missing the semicolon altogether will result in a syntax error and the game will not compile or run.
A section of code together, often denoted by its indentation with the rest of the section, is called a block. Actually, return 0; does almost nothing in the context of our game. The concept, however, is an important one. Often, the code that got the function started will be yet another function somewhere else in our code. In this case, however, it is the operating system that started the main function. So, when return 0; is executed, the main function exits and the entire program ends.
Since we have a 0 after the return keyword, that value is also sent to the operating system. We could change the value of 0 to something else and that value would be sent back instead. We say that the code that starts a function calls the function and that the function returns the value. It is just useful to introduce it here. Remember the int from int main?
We can return any value that qualifies as an int ; perhaps 0, 1, , 6,, and so on. Functions can return a big selection of different types, including types that we invent for ourselves! That type, however, must be made known to the compiler in the way we have just seen. You can even run the game at this point. Alternatively, you can use the F5 shortcut key:. You will just get a black screen. What is happening is that our program is starting, executing from the first line of main , which is return 0; , and then immediately exiting back to the operating system.
We now have the simplest program possible coded and running. We will now add some more code to open a window that the game will eventually appear in. The window will be 1, pixels wide by 1, pixels high, and will be full screen no border or title. Enter the new code that is highlighted here to the existing code and then we will examine it. As you type or copy and paste , try and work out what is going on:. The first thing we will notice in our new code is the include directive.
The include directive tells Visual Studio to include , or add, the contents of another file before compiling. The effect of this is that some other code, which we have not written ourselves, will be a part of our program when we run it. The process of adding code from other files into our code is called preprocessing and perhaps unsurprisingly is performed by something called a preprocessor.
It is the same folder that we created while setting up the project. This line adds code from the aforementioned file, which gives us access to some of the features of SFML. Exactly how it achieves this will become clearer when we start writing our own separate code files and using include to use them. The main files that we will be including throughout this book are the SFML header files that give us access to all the cool game-coding features.
What matters for now is that we have a whole bunch of new functionalities that have been provided by SFML available to use if we add that single line of code. The next new line is using namespace sf;. We will come back to what this line does soon. We will fully discuss OOP, classes, and objects as we proceed through this book.
What follows is a brief introduction so that we can understand what is happening. We already know that OOP stands for object-oriented programming.
OOP is a programming paradigm, that is, a way of coding. OOP is generally accepted throughout the world of programming, in almost every language, as the best, if not the only, professional way to write code. OOP introduces a lot of coding concepts, but fundamental to them all are classes and objects.
When we write code, whenever possible, we want to write code that is reusable, maintainable, and secure. The way we do this is by structuring our code as a class. For example, if we wanted zombie NPC s non-player characters , we could carefully design and code a class called Zombie and then, from that single class, create as many zombie objects as we like. Each and every zombie object would have the same functionality and internal data types, but each and every zombie object would be a separate and distinct entity.
To take the hypothetical zombie example further but without showing any code for the Zombie class, we might create a new object based on the Zombie class, like this:. The z1 object is now a fully coded and functioning Zombie object. We could then do this:. We now have five separate Zombie instances , but they are all based on one carefully coded class. As an example, we could code our Zombie class to enable us to use our Zombie objects, perhaps like this:.
Note again that all this zombie code is hypothetical for the moment. For example, we could design our class so that we can assign values for the data for each zombie object at the time we create it. Careful coding of the Zombie class could enable us to write code like this:. It is through classes and the objects that we create from them that we will harness the power of SFML.
And yes, we will also write our own classes, including a Zombie class. Before we move on and look more closely at VideoMode and RenderWindow , which as you have probably guessed are classes provided by SFML, we will learn what the using namespace sf; line of code does. When we create a class, we do so in a namespace.
We do this to distinguish our classes from those that others have written. Consider the VideoMode class. It is entirely possible that, in an environment such as Windows, somebody has already written a class called VideoMode. By using a namespace, we and the SFML programmers can make sure that the names of classes never clash. Without it, there would be over instances of sf:: in this simple game alone. It also makes our code more readable, as well as shorter. Inside the main function, we now have two new comments and two new lines of actual code.
The first line of actual code is this:. This code creates an object called vm from the class called VideoMode and sets up two internal values of and In the previous line of code, we are creating a new object called window from the SFML-provided class called RenderWindow.
Furthermore, we are setting up some values inside our window object. Firstly, the vm object is used to initialize part of window. At first, this might seem confusing. Remember, however, that a class can be as varied and flexible as its creator wants to make it.
And yes, some classes can contain other instances of other classes. It is not necessary to fully understand how this works at this point, as long as you appreciate the concept. We code a class and then make useable objects from that class — a bit like an architect might draw a blueprint. In this analogy, a class is like a blueprint and an object is like a house. Then, we use the predefined Style::FullScreen value to make our window object fullscreen.
The coding term for this type of value is constant. You can run the game again at this point. You will see a bigger black screen flash on and then disappear. This is the 1, x 1, fullscreen window that we just coded. Unfortunately, what is still happening is that our program is starting, executing from the first line of main , creating the cool new game window, then coming to return 0; and immediately exiting back to the operating system.
Next, we will add some code that will form the basic structure of every game in this book. This is known as the game loop. We need a way to stay in the program until the player wants to quit. At the same time, we should clearly mark out where the different parts of our code will go as we progress with Timber!!!. Furthermore, if we are going to stop our game from exiting, we had better provide a way for the player to exit when they are ready; otherwise, the game will go on forever!
Add the following highlighted code to the existing code and then we will go through it and discuss it all:. We have created a while loop. Look closely between the parentheses The full explanation of this code will have to wait until we discus loops and conditions in Chapter 4 , Loops, Arrays, Switches, Enumerations, and Functions — Implementing Game Mechanics. What is important for now is that when the window object is set to closed, the execution of the code will break out of the while loop and move on to the next statement.
Exactly how a window is closed is covered soon. We now know that our while loop will whiz round and round, repeatedly executing the code within it, until our window object is set to closed. ASCII art is a niche but fun way of creating images with computer text. The previous code is simply another type of comment. This type of comment is known as a C-style comment. Anything in between is just for information and is not compiled. I have used this slightly elaborate text to make it absolutely clear what we will be doing in each part of the code file.
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