Part I: An Introduction to Programming and C#
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Game programming is a lot of fun. Whether you want to learn game programming as a hobby or to become a professional developer, programming games is very rewarding. But a lot of people, when they first decide to learn game programming, want to start making full 3D games the first day. When I teach game programming I'll get questions like “How do I make a game like Halo 3?” or “How do I program a MMORPG?” in the first class. Some people are disappointed to hear that we can't jump into doing those kinds of things right away. Before making a 3D game we need to learn the basics of game programming and the building blocks of all programming. That's what we'll do in this first part of the book; we'll go over the basics of programming and C#. We won't even get to graphics yet; all of our programs will be Console programs, which are text based. The example programs here are all little text ones and we'll even develop a very simple text-based “game” in the second through third chapters and some basic ship game code in chapters four and five. (I put game in quotes because it will really be just the start of a game; we'll save the larger and complete games for XNA) We'll be going through this material as quickly as possible, so we can get to the more exciting Part II where we start making our 2D games.