Sams Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours

This hour demonstrated an interesting feature of many commercial games that you now know how to add to your own games. I'm referring to demo mode, which allows a game to present to the game player a glimpse of how the game plays. Demo mode was a critical feature in arcade games, where a game needed to sell itself in order to convince someone to spend a quarter on a play. Computer games don't rely as heavily on demo mode because they don't live on quarters , but it's nonetheless an important touch on a game that might otherwise do nothing in between plays.

The next hour wraps up the book by showing you one last game feature that we've all grown to love: the high score list. The high score list is an important part of most classic video games because it provided a means of measuring your skill at a game and saving it for others to see.