Raimondas Pupius - SFML Game Development By Example

Raimondas Pupius is a game development enthusiast from Lithuania. He is currently working towards getting a degree in software engineering as well as working on a few projects of his own. Starting his unofficial education in this field at the age of 9, and having been introduced to video games even prior to that, helped narrow down his decision regarding a career choice. His ultimate dream is, of course, starting his own company and creating professional games for a living. "It beats my previous choice of being a plumber when I was four years old!" he says jokingly.

His other interests include web development, which was his primary interest before game development, music, and linguistics.

First, I would like to express my deepest thanks to Usha Iyer for offering me the opportunity to write this book and bringing me on board. In addition to that, I would like to thank Prachi Bisht, Mamata Walkar, and Pramod Kumavat for being great to work with and handling the production duties.

Lastly, I would like to thank my mom, grandmother, my beautiful wife, as well as her entire family for showing me endless love and support throughout this entire ordeal. I wouldn't be where I am today without your kindness, understanding, and patience during my late-night binge writing. This book is dedicated to you!

Tom Ivanyo is an aspiring game and software developer. After learning Visual Basic, he picked up several other languages, from Assembly to C#. Currently, he is working as a software developer and spending his free time creating games along with his friend, Doug Madden. Together, they started their small gaming studio named S2D Games (http://s2dgames.com).

Vittorio Romeo is a computer science student at the University of Messina and a C++ enthusiast. Since childhood, he has been interested in computers, gaming, and programming. He learned to develop games and applications as an autodidact at a very young age. He started with the VB/C# and the .NET environment, and moved on to C++ and native cross-platform programming. He works on his open source general-purpose C++14 libraries in his spare time and develops open source free games using SFML2. The evolution of C++ is something that greatly interests him. He has also spoken about game development with the latest standard features at CppCon 2014.

Richa Sachdeva is an avid programmer. She believes in designing games that are high on educational content as well as entertainment and is giving her two cents towards creating and exploring different dimensions in the field of game programming. She is a physics graduate who somewhere along the line found her true calling in computers and has ever since been amazed by this strange pixilated world. When not thinking about games or deciding on which movie to watch, she finds solace in writing.

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Preface

Game development is one of the most interesting career choices to date. Apart from the many other fields that are incorporated in this process, it's also a realm where pure imagination comes to life. Even during the times when one may think that there's nothing new under the sun, ground-breaking ideas are still cemented in this medium, both as revolutionary milestones and exciting adventures that will make us feel child-like excitement yet again.

Getting started with game programming is easier now than ever before! Documentation and tutorials aside, there even exist enthusiasts out there who actually put together libraries of code that can be used to eliminate the redundant or difficult parts of building different types of applications. As it so happens, one of these libraries is titled "Simple and Fast Multimedia Library", and it is the focal point of this publication.

Throughout the course of this book, three projects are built from scratch, with each one having increased complexity compared to its preceding project. We will start with a basic clone of the classical arcade game Snake , which introduces the basics of SFML and some of the framework that is going to persist until the very end. As difficult subjects are addressed, we will begin to cobble the second project together, turning it into a side-scrolling platformer. The remaining chapters of this book focus on building and polishing an online RPG-style game that can be played with your friends! No detail of any of these projects will remain undiscussed, as you will be guided through the entire process of planning and implementing every single aspect of these projects.