A few weeks ago a coworker of mine stopped by my desk with a coding question.  We’d recently been quizzing each other over our C knowledge, so I smiled and braced myself for the hell which was clearly to come.

He wrote a few lines of code up on the whiteboard and asked what the program output:

It seemed pretty straightforward. I explained the order of operator precedence – postfix binds before multiplication which binds before addition and also that multiplication and addition’s associativity was left to right, so I grabbed the marker and started writing out the arithmetic.

After I smugly scribbled down the answer, my coworker replied a simple “nope”. I thought for a few minutes, and was stumped. I couldn’t quite remember the order of the postfix operators’ associativity. Furthermore, I knew that wouldn’t even change the order of evaluation here as associativity rules only apply between…

It’s easy to get lost in all the details of building a great video or computer game – so easy in fact, that we can forget the parts of a game that make them fun to play. The following serves as a gentle reminder of what prompts players to play games in the first place. Refer to this reminder in the event that you get bogged down or distracted with confusing C++ syntax, or lines and lines of Visual Basic statements and DLL structures.
1. Remember the player is the main character. Here’s a secret between you and me: People play games to gain a sense of control. If you can manage to program your game in a way that puts the player in control, then you’ve already won half the battle. This doesn’t mean to suggest that the game should be easy. It simply means that when a gamer…