Game Development 101

Abstract

Game development is hard—not so much because it’s rocket science, but because there’s a huge amount of information to digest before you can actually start writing the game of your dreams. On the programming side, you have to worry about such mundane things as file input/output (I/O), user input handling, audio and graphics programming, and networking code. And those are only the basics! On top of that, you will want to build your actual game mechanics. The code for that needs structure as well, and it is not always obvious how to create the architecture of your game. You’ll actually have to decide how to make your game world move. Can you get away with not using a physics engine and instead roll your own simple simulation code? What are the units and scale within which your game world is set? How does it translate to the screen?