Beginning C++ Game Programming – Part 1

Basic introduction to C++ with SFML with readout code. The instructor voice is not clear and sounds very sleepy. The subject was interesting because SFML is really an easy entry for beginners into graphics world via C++. Concepts of graphics should have been explained visually, but the chance was completely missed and ends up as a code readout. Totally destroyed the purpose. First gives a more confident progress and feels like wasted time from the mid of the course. Entire Zombie project was plain readout in that sleepy voice.

Yes

It was a great experience and I’ve learned a lot.

It’s okay so far. The one major improvement that could be done is the assets for the first game, Timber. I’m using a Windows 10 laptop, and I had a problem following along with Timber, because the assets used were not displaying properly on my laptop, despite messing with the resolution settings. I had to manually resize the assets, and then things just got sloppy. The background and sprites appeared too zoomed in. I’m definitely excited about this Class/objects section, because I’ve been having a hard time with collision detection, and I’m hoping that the following sections will help clear some things up.

It’s been a good experience so far. As a first year computer science student learning C++ this was a good course to do in my spare time. Makes learning C++ more fun and closer to my interest in games. One thing I find particularly needing improvement is the voice over artist. Sounds kind of sleepy and doesn’t have a very engaging tone. Information and content wise, I think is pretty good and meets my expectations. Thank you for this course.

This course was quite a disappointment, it is written for an older version of the compiler/programming environment so none of the examples for setting up templates, directories, etc will work as shown. For example in lesson 3 you are shown how to modify a Win32 project to create a custom template for this course. Problem is that VS2017 doesn’t have a WIN32 template, Visual Studio 2015 did but unless you have a MSDN membership Visual Studio 2015 is no longer available. After an hour of research I found out what replaced WIN32 in the editor and tried to continue, unfortunately all of the other menu locations shown were now incorrect as well. So what should have been a 5 10 min exercise took several hours of research and has been frustrating enough that I will be looking for another course to take. To make it even worse all of the questions that have been asked by the students in the Q/A page have been answered in the most generic ‘please go into more detail’ way possible. There really is no help given and the people asking questions just eventually stop trying and I can only assume quit the course. If you are looking for a course to teach C++ I would try one of the others that are here, if you are looking for a course on the SFML library I think I saw one other here and I will be trying that. To sum up, that may have been a good course at one time, but it is seriously out of date and will take more time to figure out how to do the lessons, not to mention learn the subject that it is worth. If the comments from PACkt are to be believed they will not be updating (and apparently not supporting) this course.

The course is very interesting, however it definitely isn’t for total beginners. The basics of C++ are explained very briefly as you haven’t coded anything in this language you might want to start with simpler stuff. Another thing the code is being copied and then pasted which makes it more difficult to follow. Personally I prefer to type along with the speaker. If you know C++ and you want to get to know basics of SFML it is a good place to start.