Visual C# Game Programming for Teens 1st Edition

by Jonathan S. Harbour (Author)

23 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1435458482

ISBN-10: 1435458486

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Learn how to create your own fully functioning role-playing game (RPG) with VISUAL C# GAME PROGRAMMING FOR TEENS! A true beginner's guide, the book covers each essential step for creating your own complete RPG using Windows Forms and GDI+, including a tiled scroller, game editors, and scripting. While some experience with Visual C# is helpful, this book is an introductory guide for readers who are new to programming or new to programming for games and want to learn the basics of RPG game mechanics. You will learn by studying the short examples in each chapter, building the complete RPG called Dungeon Crawler as you move from one chapter to the next, with new features and game play elements added in each new chapter. Along the way you'll discover how to load and draw bitmaps, create sprites, render a game world, keep track of inventory and character stats, and build tools including a level editor, character editor, item editor, and monster editor. And the finished Dungeon Crawler game includes all the source code and tools you'll need to make your own awesome RPGs with loads of cool features and functionality.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Features of Visual C# Game Programming for Teens

Uses the latest version of Visual C# programming language.

Uses step-by-step tutorials for hands-on practice of new skills.

Shows the reader how to create a complete role-playing game.

Written for teens and beginners.

"Note," "Tip," "Hint," and "Definition" boxes throughout the text offer additional info from the author.

Book Contents

The book is divided into three major parts.

"Part I, Dungeon Prerequisites" includes five chapters that form the foundation of the role-playing game that is developed in the book. These chapters cover subjects like Windows Forms, bitmaps, sprite animation, user input, collision detection, and sound effects.

"Part II, Building the Dungeon" includes four chapters devoted to building the game engine components needed to manage and render dungeon levels. The core of this rendering system is a tiled scroller and a level editor.

"Part III, Exploring the Dungeon" includes six chapters that develop all of the gameplay components of the engine that make the Dungeon Crawler game truly playable. This part offers additional game editors and classes that make it possible to fight monsters, pick up treasure, manage the player's inventory and equipped gear, gain experience and level up, and talk with NPCs.

From the Author

Source code for the projects in this book may be downloaded from these book resource locations:

courseptr.com/downloads (search by author or book title)
jharbour.com/forum (must create a free account first)

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cengage Learning PTR; 1st edition (March 25, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1435458486
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1435458482
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 12 - 17 years
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 8 - 12
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.01 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,306,533 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #48 in Teen & Young Adult Computer Programming
- #146 in Teen & Young Adult Computer & Video Games
- #326 in Children's Programming Books

Customer Reviews:
23 ratings

About the author

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Jonathan S. Harbour

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Jonathan S. Harbour holds a Master's in Information Systems, with a focus in software project management. He spent five years as a college professor where he taught computer science, and has written extensively on game development. His background and fascination with AI and human behavior and physics fuels his fiction and he worked for years on database and web development while writing in his spare time.

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4 star		17%
3 star		13%
2 star		7%
1 star		14%

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Amazon Customer

Not just for teens

Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2013

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This is a great book for learning to write game programs, regardless of your age or level of experience.
The author walks you through getting a fully functional game up and running on using just the stuff available in Visual Studio. C# is a modern and easy-to-use programming language, and the WinForms API provides great support for all the things a game program needs to do (obtain user input, load and display image files, load and play sound files, save and load game data in xml files, etc.)
The level editor that you build in chapter 6 is worth the price of the book. Download the source code at the author's site if you are undecided.

4 people found this helpful

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SyrslyTwitch

Book is incomplete. Examples are missing.

Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2012

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The book is great as a stepping stone to get started programming your first game. It is also useful to people like myself, people with previous programming experience. However, the examples given do not work, and there is a lot of material the book refers to that does not exist or does not work. Most of the included code does not work unless you tweak the code a lot. That is fine by me, because I bought the book to use it for some motivation. However, newcomers to the language will be disappointed to have to go elsewhere to find working examples. The explanations are a bit vague, too, but they get the point across most of the time.

The main reason I give this book a 3/5 is the author is not supportive of his readers' learning aptitudes. He refers you to his site to get the rest of the book's examples. The mentioned examples are missing from where you're supposed to go. Instead, you have to find them on his forum, where the examples are still incomplete. The book on its own also feels incomplete. Toward the end of the book, most readers will wonder where some of the examples mentioned are. The author admittedly never found time to make the examples. On his forum, he continues to string people along, saying that he included everything inside the book that was meant to be there. When people say they are missing something or can't find something, he does not help them. Instead, he says they are doing something wrong and is very vague and dismissive about all the support questions he gets. Many of the people on his forum have mentioned the same problems and continue to do so.

Do not be scared away from this book, though! The stuff in the book is still great reading material. If you are a C# beginner, this book is perfect for you. It will show you many techniques that programmers may use to make a game, from tiles to ray casting to simple A.I. to basic RPG elements.

This language isn't for everyone, however. I recommend you start with something simpler, like Flash or Game Maker, to get a feel for game development workflows before you start learning proper programming techniques. I also recommend you check out pocket reference guides for the languages you wish to learn, because they offer easy access to useful information and are very easy to carry around.

One person found this helpful

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Ricardo Portella

Confuse and not for beginners

Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2013

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ADDENDUM TO THE OLD REVIEW
All my comments below are still valid, but I keep going back to this book after many years. So, although its failures, it is a valuable resource for old style programmers like me. By old style programmers I mean Windows Form applications based on .NET. If you are looking for UWP programming find another book, this one is for guys who grew up programming in Windows 95.
OLD REVIEW
The book definitely is not for teens or beginners. It explains very little of the process of creating a project in Visual C#. You have to be familiar with the interface of the tool. But that is not the only flaw of the book. Although some of the classes given in the book are good, they are confuse and it seems that the author lost his strength at the end of the book, because book ends and you do not have a functioning game at the end. Lots of things are lacking.
Also, the double buffer strategy are very slow. My machine is not a high end machine, but it is above average, and the final version of the game runs very slow in it with some strange behaviors.
It is a good atempt to describe a RPG game developed in Visual C# for a standard Windows application, but it is not a polished product that you could use in a serious game development.

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Gerson

Very good!

Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2020

Verified Purchase

Very good C# programming book!
A Fun way to learn C#.

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Irene P. Smith

Excellent book for beginning Game Programmers

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2014

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This is an excellent book for beginning programmers but also useful for people who know C# and want to learn about the data structures and coding for creating RPGs. You don't have to be a teenager to learn something useful.

One person found this helpful

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Shawn Irwin

For Teens?

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2011

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I do programming as a hobby, and have been doing it for years, have done Visual Basic, some C#, some C++, Assembly, QBasic, Java, ASP, Maya Mel programming and even some Python. I bought this book because I am building a dungeon crawler. On the positive side, the code that comes with the book is great, and all of it works with no bugs that I could find.
On the negative side, I find the code poorly explained. For example: Why does he choose to create the form dynamically? Why is it that when I run his code, the key press works, but I enter the exact same code in my program, in the exact same location, and it does not? It appears to me, as I read the book, that the author was working under a deadline, and and just did not take the time to explain the code and do a good job on this book. The last straw is though, that the author does not provide you any way to contact him with questions, or even mention C# help forums, and, as a result, I cannot give this book a higher review. I would not recommend this book, especially not for TEENS!
The book I would recommend would be:
C# Game Programming: For Serious Game Creation by Daniel Schuller, and, to teens.

9 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

ba_rev

Terrible.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 17, 2013

Verified Purchase

I think the author, publisher and marketing department were all on different pages when they came up with this book. The book is clearly marketed and beginners (“A true beginners guide”), however there is very little in terms of C# teachings contained and large chunks of code are not explained by the author from a C# point of view; you will learn very little about C# from this book! Blatantly false advertising to sell more copies than the book deserves.

The book does say that some C# knowledge is helpful; which I disagree with, C# knowledge is essential unless you just want to copy and paste without knowing what the code is doing. If I had good C# knowledge, I really don’t think I would need this book personally as much of the content is based on standard windows/.NET forms and content (one chapter literally has you drawing lines and squares).

The book is clearly rushed in my opinion, the fact that the author doesn’t even given a basic guide on how to setup the IDE and projects speaks volumes, large chunks of code are not described at all and the end results are just very poor in my view; you don’t even get any good playable source code to re-use yourself. There are many open source projects out there that are free and would be a better investment of time and effort.

The final straw, and the point I have given up on this book was when I skipped ahead with the source code to the final chapters and compiled to see what the end product was, and to be honest its very poor. The final straw was my laptop going berserk with 99% CPU usage and memory leaking when running the code from the later chapters. (P.s my laptop runs many things fine and can compile other code without issues, including running the UNITY 3D game engine).

If you would like to learn game programming I would have a look at Walker Boy Studio who do some excellent tutorials and actually explain the code! Also there is a C# Hack and Slash tutorial on BurgZerg Arcade which actually explains C#!! These use the UNITY Game engine which is vastly superior to the basic .Net Windows Forms/2D code in this book.

If you want to learn C#, C# Step by Step seems pretty good so far. I have also had a quick browse on the net and there are several C# RPG tutorial blogs which contain more helpful info than this book.

Very disappointing book overall, I wanted to learn C# and write a decent game; this book has not helped me with either of these goals in the slightest.

4 people found this helpful

Alonso

A book review is a one men's view. After ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 30, 2015

Verified Purchase

A book review is a one men's view. After reading the book, I was not sure who the target audiences was for the book. For the seasoned programmer of little use, for the newbie game designer may be some benefit.

Barnaby Mercer

Has potential, but hamstrung by dubious choice of technology.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 11, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book is OK. It has some useful information and is written in an approachable style, but is totally let down by the poor choice of software technology. It uses GDI+ and this just isn't up for the job. Unless you have sufficiently powerful PC, the examples will run horribly slowly. And by 'sufficiently powerful', I mean that the computer I'm currently using can play modern games without much trouble, but the basic scrollers in this book creak along at 4 fps, consuming 100% processor.

These performance problems sapped the fun out of this book and turned what could have been a great learning experience into a frustrating exercise.

I contacted the author via his forum and, to be fair, he did respond and attempt to suggest a solution, but we didn't get very far. Rather than bang my head against these problems, I eventually abandoned the book and begin teaching my lad to use XNA instead. It's much more suitable for this job.

2 people found this helpful

Berry_hihi

Really good

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 29, 2013

Verified Purchase

This is such an amazing book! It came really quickly and well packaged.

I got this as a gift for my boyfriend and he loves it! It's really thick and is really easy to learn from. WOULD RECOMMEND TO ANYONE INTERESTED IN MAKING GAMES.

M.Varley

Great and not just for teens

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2013

Verified Purchase

Great book even if your a newbie learner like myself. Learning Visual C# and other languages from a create your own RPG angle is a fantastic way to keep yourself keen. I've been modding the content to make an RPG more like what i want rather than what the book resources but if you follow the book then your on the right track, highly recommend the "for teens", even if your not a teen, like me, who is 30

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Visual C# Game Programming for Teens 1st Edition

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About the author

Jonathan S. Harbour

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