My Journey into Game Programming

I started to learn about game programming as probably most people do: by using Google and finding information about it. It was enough for me to put a few games together and be happy with them. But when I decided that I wanted to explore the subject further, I started to search for books.

I preferred books written in Java for two main reasons. The first is that I'm well experienced in Java. The second, and most important, I wanted to port the knowledge gained from those books to the Android Platform, which also used Java.

I primarily searched on Amazon and read the reviews there. I bought two books on the subject and was very satisfied with them.

The first book I got was Killer Game Programming in Java, by Andrew Davison, published by O'Reilly. Although I had the impression that the book is not the best example of OO programming and code reuse, it contains a lot of great examples of how to implement things in Java. The chapter about coding the game loop alone is worth the price of the book. Actually, it was the base for my own game loop code. There are many cool examples using Java 2D. The downside of the book is that the chapters on 3D rely heavily on Java 3D, which is OK if you want to use that API in your code. But I wanted things at a "lower level" so that I could port to Android. The chapters on AI and Pathfinding are great, too!

The second book was Developing Games in Java, by David Brackeen. This book is somewhat different from the first one. So, I wouldn't recommend buying one or the other, they actually complement each other. This one is more object-oriented, so it provides better insights into actually building a reusable game engine, which is, in fact, the stronger point of this book. The 3D chapters are awesome. The author teaches the reader how to code a 3D software renderer from scratch in Java. Although the software renderer is not very useful in the real world, it gives the reader a lot of knowledge on how hardware renderers actually work, making it much easier to learn and work with them.