22. Game Programming

Learning to design and program simple games provides a good context for learning many fundamental computing concepts such as user interaction, collision detection, conditional branching, boolean logic, object oriented design, and state machines.

22.1. Links to Game Programming Tutorials

Listed below are links to some excellent online tutorials and blogs that focus on simple game programming using the Processing language.

22.1.1. Dark Views Writing Games with Processing.

In this set of blog posts, the author creates a set of tutorials about how to develop games in processing. He uses an iterative approach to design a simple game. He uses an object oriented approach to create a simple game and includes details on how he’d refactor his code after his initial prototype.

22.1.2. Dr Doane Thinking Through A Basic Pong Game in Processing.

This blog provides a very good overview of the problem-solving approach to designing a basic Pong game using Processing. This tutorial uses functional decomposition rather than an object oriented approach so this tutorial can help students understand basic function design including basic collision detection.

22.1.3. Cate Huston Let’s Make a Simplified Game of Pacman.

This blog tutorial creates a very simple version of Pacman.