Ok, i am a beginner but just had a question. I am about halfway through my Learn C book, and i dont understand for the life of me how a game can be made out of this. Maybe i just havent gotten to that part in the book yet, or maybe it comes in on one of my later books, but right now all i am learning is things like printf, if-else statements, variables, operators, etc. Just general coding stuff. So i guess my overall question is, how does a game work?
That's already enough to write a simple text adventure (I've got a sample one I wrote years ago but it's a Codewarrior format, so I'll have to convert it to Xcode at some point).
RocketMan, check out some of our tutorials. Especially the ones on animation. That should give you some idea of how a game could possibly be developed!
That's what games are made of...lots and lots of "general coding stuff". Think of those things as building blocks. Unfortunately (or maybe not), there isn't a magic "make a game" command. --Eric
Yep! Unlike what many people think, you don't type in "make awesome game," press Enter, then have an awesome game appear on your desktop.
I know that. You didn't answer my question. Let me rephrase it. How do lines of text and pictures form a playable game?
I feel a zen moment coming on. Philosophy aside, you've learned a little about a language, and the next step is to learn how to apply it in a specific environment. So Obj-C, is useful in Cocoa, where Cocoa contains all the code for handling platform-specific functionality: displaying images and text, accessing data, input, etc.. (read about the meaning of API's and Frameworks) Once you have a better grasp on how to make things move around and generally do the stuff you'd like it to, you can plan a game. Start with utterly basic stuff, no matter how ambitious you are... too much ambition too early will just lead you down complicated roads and you'll learn nothing and be frustrated by everything. Bring much patience...
I guess your question has to do with interfaces? So lines and graphics can become a game when you learn how to change the lines and graphics in response to something the user does, like a keystroke or, in the iPod Touch's case, a tap on the screen. Does that answer your question?
@Rocketman: Just a thought, why not starting with something more "high level" like the Unity engine (unity3d.com) and start off from there instead of going through all the ground work at the beginning? Surely it helps to know all the low level stuff, but to me it sounds you need something that explains first how a game works like the fully documented 3d platformer tutorial like this or some iPhone specific game tutorials like this.
