Programming Windows Games With Borland C++/Book and Disk : 9780672302923

Computer games are by far the most popular type of software. The market for
game software is huge—practically anyone with a PC can use games. If you
are like me, you probably play your share of computer games and have your
own favorite categories. And because you are a programmer, you might have
thought of many ideas that could be the basis of a game—if only you knew
how to get started on the project. As you will see after reading this book, writing
a computer game is not as difficult as you might have imagined. In fact,
once you see how a game is written, you have a number of well-defined steps
that you can follow to create your own game. After you have had some fun
writing your own game, it may even become a source of income for you.

The basic premise of Programming Windows Games with Borland C++ is that
whether entertaining or educational, all computer games have certain common
elements: graphics, sound, and a mouse- or keyboard-based user interface.
Thus, any programmer (with some imagination) who masters the basic techniques
of manipulating images, generating sound, and controlling the mouse
or keyboard can write a computer game. The best way to learn how to program
games is to see working examples that illustrate how an imaginative idea
can come alive in a computer game with graphics and sound.

Programming Windows Games with Borland C++ teaches intermediate to advanced
level C++ programmers how to use object-oriented programming techniques
to write computer games. Borland C++ offers exceptional support for
Microsoft Windows programming, includes the ObjectWindows Library
(OWL)—a comprehensive C function library—and provides a full set of programming
tools such as MAKE, TLINK, TLIB, and the Turbo Debugger. The
games presented in this book are meant to run under Microsoft Windows 3.1
because Windows offers a rich graphical user interface for the games and, more
importantly, because there is a shortage of games that run under Windows.