Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours

Chapter 3. Creating an Engine for Games

A game is a specialized type of program, but it is still just a program written in a programming language. This means that you can create a game just as you would any other Windows program, such as the Skeleton application you saw in Hour 2, “A Windows Game Programming Primer.” However, certain game-specific tasks must be carried out in all games. Therefore, it would be quite helpful to organize the code in your games so that the game-specific code is isolated from the general Windows application code. In isolating this code, it might also be useful to build in some cool features that apply solely to games. The idea I’m suggesting is that of a game engine, which is a grouping of program code that performs ...