Fontanini - Game development with SlimDX

Michael Fontanini has a passion for video games and computers, loves animals, and is a very friendly yet timid person. He first got into computer programming when he was just a kid, and was given a toy made by VTech, called the PreComputer 1000. It had a programming mode in it, which was a very basic form of the language BASIC. Out of curiosity, he played around with it, and became fascinated with his new ability to make a computer do whatever he wanted. He soon discovered QBasic (QuickBasic) on a Windows PC (a DOS version of the language BASIC that came with old versions of Windows) and started messing up with that. From there, he eventually moved on to Visual Basic, and then C++ and C#.

As he grew older, his passion for video games grew, and eventually, he realized he could combine these two passions and make video games. Nintendo's, The Legend of Zelda series, has been one of his favorite game franchises and a great source of inspiration. Creating virtual worlds in computers also fascinated him. So, he has spent countless hours playing with game programming and level creation recreationally, and has learned a lot along the way. He aspires to become a successful indie game developer.

He was held back by some anxiety issues and hasn't been very successful in life, but the book Game Development with SlimDX , Packt Publishing , was a great opportunity, so he pursued it. Michael enjoyed this new journey and is proud of his work. He is always there for his friends and family. Having been a bit of a loner growing up, he learned the hard way how precious good friends and family are. He is thankful for all that he has.

I'd like to thank my friends (especially my best friend, John Carlson) and family for supporting me in writing Game Development with SlimDX , and encouraging me to undertake this endeavor, as well as all of the people at Packt Publishing for giving me the opportunity to write this book, and for working with me on this book.

I'd also like to thank the website, http://wrathgames.com/blog, [WrathGames Studio]for the music track we used in the third chapter of this book.

Mitchell Davis is employed by Kansas City Life Insurance Company as a Solutions Architect. With eight years' experience in .NET and Windows technology, he has become well-versed in patterns and best practices with .NET and other programming technologies.

I would like to thank Nicole, Nora, Darby, and Jared for all their support.

Lennard Fonteijn started programming in BASIC in his early teens on a very old DOS PC. While he developed his skills over the years, programming was always a hobby. With some trepidation that turning his hobby into work would make him lose interest in programming, he decided to study Computer Science.

During his first internship, he quickly discovered that programming websites and applications wasn't what he wanted to do for the rest of his life, and he decided to focus on his other passion besides programming: gaming.

While Lennard enjoyed playing games, he was particularly fascinated by how they worked internally. Having spent quite some time fiddling around with libraries such as DirectX, he knew this had to become his specialty someday.

As a result, he did everything in his power to bend his Computer Science studies towards gaming by following an ActionScript 3 classa Serious Games classand by minoring in game technology. He did his final internship at a local game company and received his bachelor's degree in 2013.

Since graduating, Lennard has worked as a freelancer, leaving him enough spare time to work on his own projects as well as prepare himself for an eventual full-time job in the game industry.

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Preface

This book is a quick, hands-on guide to the basics of game programming with SlimDX. SlimDX is a managed wrapper for DirectX, allowing us to use the full power of DirectX in managed languages such as C# (pronounced C Sharp). This is a huge benefit since managed languages such as C# are much nicer to work in than lower-level languages such as C++, which increases productivity since many things can be done quicker.