Some "pre-sales" questions...

plarpco

@MikeDX Thank you. I can wait!

plarpco

Quick update on my journey! So far so good. I've stopped and re-started 4 times. I finally finished the game tutorials which helped a lot. I think I have a good path, and my code is more organized and thought-out. My guess is I'll be on version 10 before it's fully playable.

I'm realizing now that my knowledge of game programming is lacking. Give me a business problem and a database, and I can put something together in my sleep, but this is all very different (and exciting).

Does anyone have any recommendations for books that might help with some of the general concepts of game programming? I know it can be very language specific, but I'm wondering if there are any resources that will just get me thinking about these problems in a different way. Maybe I'm looking for a silver bullet that doesn't exist. I'm willing to just grind it out (the journey is most of the fun), but I can only work on this at night (from 10pm - 12 am yawn) and a couple of hours on the weekend, and I'm getting tired of just hitting F5 here to see new posts trying to get my FUZE fix.

What I need is a windows version of FUZE so I can be coding during the day on the company dime. shhhh don't tell my boss

Bl4ckM4ch1n3

@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:

Does anyone have any recommendations for books that might help with some of the general concepts of game programming? I know it can be very language specific, but I'm wondering if there are any resources that will just get me thinking about these problems in a different way. Maybe I'm looking for a silver bullet that doesn't exist.

You could take a look at Humble Bundle from time to time. Humble Bundle offers great bundles with games, software and books with changing themes. You can pay what you want but there are different tiers within every bundle. For example "Pay at least 1$ to get this, pay 10$ and you'll get that stuff as well" and so on and so forth. And you can decide where your money goes. You can give money to the creators of the content, you can leave humble bundle a tip and most important: you can support different charity organisations. It doesn't matter who gets your choosen amount. You could even give 100% to charity.

They had great bundles in the past regarding game developing, ranging from game making software (for example Clickteam Fusion and GameMaker) to complete IDE stuff (Unity and Unreal Engine).

Currently there is an Unreal Engine Game Development bundle and a Learn and play VR-AR Game Dev bundle available.

While the VR-AR bundle doesn't seem to be helpful, the Unreal Engine bundle contains a "Math For Games Training Course". Don't know if it's worth 18.21$ (currently, price keeps increasing because it's "pay more than the average") but that could be a start. Maybe I'll get the VR-AR bundle anyways as developing a Smartphone AR-App/Game looks like much fun to me.

Another possibility could be Udemy. There you'll find different online courses for almost anything you can imagine. There's currently a flash sale where you'll pay only 12€ per course (at least this sale is available in germany, don't know where you are from).

@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:

What I need is a windows version of FUZE so I can be coding during the day on the company dime. shhhh don't tell my boss

IIRC someone from the FUZE Team said that they're working on a FUZE4 Windows version. FUZE BASIC already exists but it represents an old version with less functionality as far as I remember.

Hope this was helpful!

plarpco

@Bl4ckM4ch1n3 Thank you. Very helpful. I've looked at humble bundles for games but didn't realize they did educational stuff. I'll take a look. Something like "Math for Games" is exactly what I'm looking for! Thanks for the detailed response!

Martin

If you just want Math for Games it's available on it's own for $18 : https://www.gamedev.tv/p/math-for-games

But may as well grab all the extra stuff too while the humble bundle is running.

SteveZX81

Yeah, I'd love a book on beginners coding too but there's nothing I've found that might be good as its all too specific for certain languages.
We just need Dave or Martin to write a Fuze book and we'll buy it off Amazon ;)

Bl4ckM4ch1n3

@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:

@Bl4ckM4ch1n3 Thank you. Very helpful. I've looked at humble bundles for games but didn't realize they did educational stuff. I'll take a look. Something like "Math for Games" is exactly what I'm looking for! Thanks for the detailed response!

I'm glad that I was able to help! :-)

@SteveZX81 said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:

Yeah, I'd love a book on beginners coding too but there's nothing I've found that might be good as its all too specific for certain languages.
We just need Dave or Martin to write a Fuze book and we'll buy it off Amazon ;)

I actually don't think that we'd need a book about basic coding for F4NS, as there are good tutorials, a documented language and a nice forum full of helpful people. You can't write a book about basic coding that's not tied to a specific language as basic coding is different for each language. Each language has a different feature set ranging from simple things like variable declaration to more complicated stuff like pointers. Some languages need to know if they are storing an integer value in "player_health" (C/C++/C# etc), while others don't (like F4NS or Python). Some languages are supporting pointers (C/C++ etc) and others are not (F4NS?).

I think a book about basic game engineering/game design concepts would be much more helpful. Something like "how to implement a functional Exp system and how to balance it" or "how to build a working Inventory and loot system with different drop-chances". Of course you can't provide the source code for each language but you can describe how something basically works. So you'd be able to turn this concept into code. It could look like:

What you'll need to build an Inventory and randomized loot system:
    A language that supports the following things: 
    - arrays or lists
    - a function to generate random numbers 
    - structs or classes

An Item can be represented by a class or a struct that contains different values. 
If you want to keep it simple, just create an Item-ID variable and assign every item a different value. 
A coin could have a value of 1 while a health potion is  represented by 2. 
Different Item-IDs are used to determine which item was picked up. 
If you want to create a much more comprehensive item and inventory system you could 
add more variables to those item structs/classes like a maximum stack size, current stack size, 
a variable which determines if the item is consumable or not and so on.
....

I think you get what I'm trying to say '^^

plarpco

@Bl4ckM4ch1n3 said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:

I think a book about basic game engineering/game design concepts would be much more helpful. Something like "how to implement a functional Exp system and how to balance it" or "how to build a working Inventory and loot system with different drop-chances".

This is exactly what I was thinking of. Almost like a recipe book for how to build certain game concepts with pseudo code and maybe a simple implementation in a "basic" language.

pianofire

@plarpco This one might be interesting https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/.

There is a sample here: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/sample.pdf

plarpco

@pianofire said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:

@plarpco This one might be interesting https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/.
There is a sample here: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/sample.pdf

Funny. I literally just finished an Amazon search, found that book, read a comment on the amazon review that mentioned it was free to read online, looked at a few chapters, and then returned to this thread to post a link.

This looks perfect!