Conclusion

Hopefully you've found this chapter to be pretty fun. Although you didn't explore a great deal of new technology, you still covered some important areas. The use of game state, for instance, lets you handle the different game modes required to make your game act professionally. You also saw how to react properly to collisions by adding ship damage, shielding, explosions, and life counts.

This chapter is really the first time you've worked on the game (not the tools). Everything else was just preparation, and now you're programming the challenge for your players. You should really think of this as the start of the project, not the end. It's at this point that you should really spend the time to add all those cool little things that make a game.

I'd highly recommend you look over the completed Star Assault game and the accompanying source code on the CD to get a feel for how all this comes together as a game.

You're not quite done yet, though. In the next chapter, you'll add the menus to drive the application.