What you need for this book

Throughout the course of writing this book, I used Visual Studio Community 2015 for Windows Desktop. It's a great IDE with all the tools that we need to create a C++ game for Windows. It's available for free from Microsoft, so I highly recommend that you download it and use it throughout the course of the book.

Don't worry if you've never used it before; we'll cover the project setup in detail so that you'll become accustomed to the parts of the IDE that we'll be using. I'll also provide the setup instructions for Code::Blocks. If you opt not to use an IDE, you'll need access to a C++ compiler so that you can run the project that we'll be working on in the book.