Chapter 1. Getting Started

Welcome to the amazing world of game programming! This book will show you the ins and outs of video games and teach you to develop your own. Game programming is a huge topic, however, and we are going to hurry through the boring material in order to get to the fun stuff. In other words, let’s start right away!

If you have read my book Game Programming for Teens, you might notice that the first four chapters of this book are awfully similar to the introduction of that book. There is a reason why: The BASIC language, taught in both books, is exactly the same, and the first part of the book is a time-tested tutorial of the language. So, if you’ve already read my other book, go ahead and skip to Part II, where we start learning about 3D graphics!

The easiest language for learning programming (at least in my opinion) is BASIC. BASIC stands for Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, but that’s not really important. BASIC is very easy to write and understand, and it’s modeled after human language (it uses words instead of just numbers), so if you can speak English, you shouldn’t have a hard time with BASIC.

We will be using a program called Blitz3D in this book. Blitz3D is built to use a modified version of BASIC in its programming. We begin with a short history of BASIC, just to get the ball rolling on the language.