Chapter 12. Conquer the Universe

Congratulations! You have come this far. If you are reading this chapter, then you have already created two games—a 2D game and a 3D game. Sure, they aren't going to sell and make you a million dollars, but you already completed more games than 90 percent of all people who try.

There is a lot more to learn, and there is no way that we can cover everything in a single book. This chapter will briefly cover a few more topics and hopefully give you at least enough information to experiment further after you are done with the book. In fact, we are going to set up a framework that will allow you to play, so we will call it the playground.

The topics that we will cover include the following:

• The playground: We will begin by setting up a template that you can use over and over again as you experiment with different features. This template will also be a good starting ground for any future games that you may want to create.

• Texture mapping: So far, we worked with color...