The Barnes & Noble Review
Forgive us for saying so, but Game Programming for Teens just might be misnamed. Sure, thousands of 13-19-year-olds would love this easy, painless introduction to game programming. (But they’re not the only people who would.)
Sure, thousands of teenagers would love to build real, playable games as they’re learning their first programming language. (But the urge for fun doesn’t disappear when you turn 20. Honest.) We’ll bet plenty of adolescents would love to take a first step towards a career in the game industry. (We suspect lots of other folks would, too.)
Young people (along with their elders) love a great discovery. Like Blitz Basic, a version of the world’s easiest programming language that’s fully optimized for game development, and is used throughout this book.
Oh, and most teenagers prefer to avoid unnecessary complexity and useless jargon. They prefer practice to theory. They like lots of examples and diagrams. (They’re sort of like grown-ups that way.)
You get the point. Game Programming for Teens is a great book for teens -- and other humans.
Maneesh Sethi introduces nearly every facet of game programming -- no experience necessary. That includes graphics, animation, audio, music, even AI. This is only possible because he’s using Blitz Basic, not a complex language like C++, or an environment that requires separate mastery of complicated DirectX or OpenGL graphics programming. (The book comes with the Blitz Basic 2D demo CD-ROM, which lets you do just about everything except compile your program for standalone distribution.)
Sethi begins with the fundamentals of programming -- techniques you’ll need no matter whatever applications you someday want to build. You’ll get comfortable with an Integrated Development Environment, then load a simple prebuilt sample game, and take a high level look at the code that drives it. Here’s your first exposure to crucial ideas like initialization, variables, functions, loops, and frames.
You’ll learn how to retrieve user input; and how to use conditionals to write programs that make decisions. By now, you’ve learned all you need to write your first “game” -- a simple guessing game. Once you’ve read Sethi’s detailed introduction to loops, functions, arrays and types in Chapter 3, you’re ready to write something more meaningful (though you do get a little extra help with the tough parts).
After a quick chapter on programming style, Sethi turns to graphics. You’ll start with simple tasks like controlling height, width, and color depth; choosing colors; changing background colors; loading images; and drawing them on screen. Sethi next introduces simple animation via “page flipping,” which seamlessly ties together multiple frames of your game, just as a movie rapidly displays consecutive images to simulate continuous motion. To use page flipping, you’ll have to master buffers -- which Sethi explains well enough for you to use them in a complete “paint” program.
You’ll find chapters on image programming, collision detection, parallax effects, audio and music, simple artificial intelligence techniques… in short, a taste of nearly every facet of game programming. Teenager or not, you’re well on the way towards becoming an old pro. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.
