Game Programming Patterns

Pdf Book Name: Game Programming Patterns
Author: Robert Nystrom
Publisher: Genever Benning
ISBN-10, 13: 0990582906,978-0990582908
Year: 2014
Pages: 354 pages
Language: English
File size: 12 MB
File format: PDF,EPUB

Download Game Programming Patterns Pdf Book Description:

In fifth grade, my friends and I were given access to a little unused classroom housing a couple of very beat-up TRS-80s. Hoping to inspire us, a teacher found a printout of some simple BASIC programs for us to tinker with. The audio cassette drives on the computers were broken, so any time we wanted to run some code, we’d have to carefully type it in from scratch. This led us to prefer programs that were only a few lines long Even so, the process was fraught with peril. We didn’t know how to program, so a tiny syntax error was impenetrable to us. If the program didn’t work, which was often, we started over from the beginning. At the back of the stack of pages was a real monster: a program that took up several dense pages of code. It took a while before we worked up the courage to even try it, but it was irresistible the title above the listing was “Tunnels and Trolls”. We had no idea what it did, but it sounded like a game, and what could be cooler than a computer game that you programmed yourself? We never did get it running, and after a year, we moved out of that classroom. (Much later when I actually knew a bit of BASIC, I realized that it was just a character generator for the table-top game and not a game in itself.) But the die was cast from there on out, I wanted to be a game programmer.

When I was in my teens, my family got a Macintosh with QuickBASIC and later THINK C. I spent almost all of my summer vacations hacking together games. Learning on my own was slow and painful. I’d get something up and running easily — maybe a map screen or a little puzzle — but as the program grew, it got harder and harder.At first, the challenge was just getting something working. Then, it became figuring out how to write programs bigger than what would fit in my head. Instead of just reading about “How to Program in C++”, I started trying to find books about how to organize programs. Fast forward several years, and a friend hands me a book: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Finally! The book I’d been looking for since I was a teenager. I read it cover to cover in one sitting. I still struggled with my own programs, but it was such a relief to see that other people struggled too and came up with solutions. I felt like I finally had a couple of tools to use instead of just my bare hands.