Thadis said:
I have a question are there any books that might show someone who is fairly new to computer programming how to add images for a simple game that is not just text based in c++? It mostly just be something fairly simple, like a side scroller(that would probably be as complex as I would want it for right now.). I am doing this for a school project and think this would be a good way to have something to show for me finishing. Are there any books that could teach me this even though I have very little actual programming knowledge as of now? or is this asking to much?
Hey Thadis.
Depending on how much experience you have, you might be better off downloading some existing libraries that do all your hard stuff like rendering 2D or 3D images, user interface, and so on, while you write the actual gameplay code yourself.
If you want to hardcode the gameplay code in your executable, then I think you could do something in a short space of time.
You will need a graphics library that supports 2D scrolling capabilities. I've only ever done 3D games myself so I can't recommend any libraries out there for 2D-specific routines.
The input shouldn't be too hard, just use DirectInput and write some routines to handle your input code. Sound can be done by DirectX or using OpenAL. OpenAL is pretty good but I can't comment on the DirectSound part of DirectX.
The hit-detection and physics is a lot easier than 3D. If you don't have time to anything fancy just use an axis aligned bounding box in 2D (axis aligned means the edges are parallel to the axis).
The difficult thing will be to develop tools to make levels and game assets. If you hardcode levels as part of data in your executable then fair enough, but if you want to develop tools to make levels, then this will form a major chunk of your time. It doesn't have to be complex, but realize that things always take more time than you anticipate.
If you have specific questions about an area of game design I'll do my best to answer them (I used to do this kind of thing).