Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours

Chapter 6. Controlling Games with the Keyboard and Mouse

All the graphics in the world wouldn’t save a game if you couldn’t interact with it. There’s a name for a game with no user interaction—it’s called a screensaver! User interaction can come from several different places, but you can generally break it down into a short list of user input devices: the keyboard, the mouse, and joysticks. The keyboard and mouse are by far the two most standard user input devices on computers, and are just about guaranteed to be supported on all personal computers. Joysticks are also quite common, but aren’t nearly as commonplace as keyboards and mice. So, you should consider the keyboard and mouse the two most important game input devices, with joysticks following ...