How Beginners Learn Game Programming

Anyone who likes to play video games may have thought about programming your own game and then making it available to others for play.

However, this project can be a little more demanding than you initially endo. What types of video games can be created, how games work and what you need to know about programming, you will learn in this article.

What is the programming of video games?

The creation of a game depends primarily on what kind of game you want to program. From simple 2D games to 3D graphic pops, everything is possible, but also different laborious. Casino Games are also developed in a similar way and you can find out more here: Casinokix

A mobile quiz game is programmed faster than a 2D multiplayer game with realistic physics. This also recognizes that the game genre alone influences what effort you have to make to be able to implement the game at all. In addition, there are which platforms you want to operate: From consoles, handhelds to PC and mobile devices, everything is possible, but also different time consuming. You might know it from exclusive titles for consoles.

It takes quite a while to release a single-console game for other consoles or PC. The best known and most elaborate example is GTA5. This game was released for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in 2013. Xbox One and Playstation 4 followed in 2014 and only in April 2015 the game was released for PC.

If you are thinking that you want your game to be as large as a GTA5, you should know that more than 1000 people were involved in the development of GTA5 and the development of the game is said to have cost the equivalent of 191.2 million. It is the most complex and expensive game development ever, showing exactly how hard it can be to program games.

How does a video game work

The complexity of a game is evident when you take a closer look under the hood. When you play video games you often hear about the term FPS. This is the abbreviation for frames per second. But what does this term mean? If you look at the game mechanics, see the following sequence:

• input
• workmanship
• output

Information about the gameplay is collected in the input. This means evaluating keyboard and mouse input or retrieving GameController data. You may even need data from the Internet, for example in multiplayer games.

Then, of course, there is information about the current score, so where are the players, who performed what action last, and which animations were active in the last step.

This information must be available for the next step. After all, everything is then calculated in the processing step: the next player position and animation, the game rules, are evaluated. Has a player already won, or has just done something else. Can an object through a wall or does it have to bounce off? So effects, rules of the game, physics and movements.

Games Calculations

All these calculations are evaluated in this 2nd step, the result is then a game state that can be spent. And so you have already arrived in the third step: the edition. Now the required objects are drawn on the screen, sound effects or music are played, controllers are activated to vibrate, and the current data is sent to the server for multiplayer games. And then the whole thing starts from scratch. This is called the GameLoop.

How many times do you think this needs to happen so you can gamble a smooth game? These 3 steps must be completed at least 24 times a second, otherwise it will look to your eye as if the game is stumbling. Better is 30, 60 and even 90 passes per second for 3D/VR games.

In the end, an image is created with each pass, in English it is called one frame. 24 calculated frames per second result in 24 fps. The cool thing about programming is that there are so-called game engines that make your work easier.

Create a video game

As fast as the gameloop conjures frames per second on the screen, unfortunately, creating a game is not at all. Even if you already know all the necessary details of programming and have enough experience, the effort is high.

You go through a typical software development process and have to do a few additional things.

If you liked this article, here is a place where you can learn how to code. Code Academy