Visual Basic Game Programming for Teens

by Jonathan S. Harbour

"Visual Basic Game Programming for Teens" teaches the younger reader how to write games with the easily approachable and popular Visual Basic 6.0 and utilizing DirectX 8.1 for the game library. It devotes little time to the fundamentals of the language, focusing instead on complete game projects to teach the subject of game programming. As a "for Teens" title, this book explains the game development topics in detail. It does not explain every aspect of DirectX, but rather, uses those components needed to teach a lesson in each chapter, focusing on game programming subjects first and foremost. The focus is concentrated on creating games rather than the logistics of game programming. For instance, several chapters will cover artwork, level editing, 3D modeling, and world building-subjects seldom covered in books of this type for the beginner/teen market. It shows how just a little more work and a few more lines of code can produce a really great game. The reader will finish this book with a satisfying sense of completion, a solid feeling of closure, and a desire to tweak and modify the sample games in the book

Genres: Programming, Stem, Reference, Nonfiction

Paperback

Reviews

[Nathan Ethridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is some good information in here for those willing to fiddle with some outdated libraries. I would probably advise against this book if you are a true beginner and stick with something a little more modern and streamlined. I went into this knowing that there was going to be a good bit of messing around attempting to get older code to run and since I'd done stuff like this in the past I sort of knew what I was getting into. That being said I think that the information here is good and that the author truly seeks to teach aspiring game programmers the way, but the devil is in the details. Visual Basic is a great beginners language that would never be used for making a real game. I don't just mean triple A blockbuster titles either as I wouldn't even ship a low budget 2D indie game with VB. The entire reason I picked this up was because I found it on sale in a bargain bin and I found the concept of using a terrible language for games to make a game amusing. I wanted to push VB to its limits and see exactly how far it could go and exactly why it's so bad for gaming applications. To that end, I did precisely that and accomplished what I set out to do. There were some interesting concepts approached here that I had never encountered before such as why using an interpreted scripting language like LUA to do certain tasks is a good idea. I have used JSON and XML a tiny bit for web apps, but seeing XML used for saving game data was neat even if not highly recommended. I really appreciated that the author covered topics like tool development and dipped the readers feet into C# programming. I think this would have been an excellent book for the target audience upon publication, but like most tech books it suffers from the problem of being outdated before it hits the shelf. By the time the book is researched, written, reviewed, published, etc... and the general public gets to finally open it, there is probably either something better or new just over the horizon. This book was published in December of 2010 so basically 2011. That's about 6 years ago from this review. The leaps and bounds that have been made in the programming world are tremendous to say the least and it's clearly visible when reading this publication. I hate to doc stars just because a book is dated but I feel it necessary to warn future readers what they could be getting into. This is a technically excellent book by an author that I highly admire. You can tell a lot of thought and heart went into this as Harbour does a great job of leading the reader to the water without drinking for them so to speak. Because of this book I now have a better understanding of topics I was fuzzy on and I'll probably keep it around as a reference for ideas if I ever incorporate some of the algorithms into my own games. If you're new to programming do yourself a favor and find something more recent so you can save yourself a lot of frustration. If you aren't new to programming you might find this interesting from a technical standpoint and you might pick up a few good tips here and there like I did.

[Serge Pierro · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good foundational book on game programming using Visual Basic. Lots of topics are covered, enabling the reader to understand the workflow of game programming in general, and using Visual Basic as a game programming tool.