How to write a simple game using visual studio c++ 2005

Question

I installed visual studio 2005 in my machine and i want to start polishing my c++ skills and i thought of doing a simple game eg. space invaders!

What am wondering can i do the whole game using just vs2005 without any other external libraries?

Any simple examples/links out there that have used plain vs2005 to create simple games?

Gath

Answer 1

The majority of Windows games these days use Microsoft's freely-available DirectX SDK. The SDK itself comes with a extensive help files and tutorials that should get you going.

Rather than use C++, however, I would recommend a beginner to use XNA and C# to learn the concepts.

Answer 2

My answer is "Yes". But, it's not just using C++ with VS. You need to learn Windows programming by using Win32 APIs or MFC to handle user's input(windows messages) and graphics (GDI) for game development. If you want to make games more seriously, you also need to learn DirectX which is a set of APIs to handle multimedia programs (including games) much more efficiently.

So, if you simply want to make a game like "space invaders", it might take a long time to start actual gameplay programming since you need to learn all those basic stuff. There are more convenient framworks for developing this kind of games such as pygame (python) and xna (C#). It depends on your intention of the project and time constraint. Good luck!