Version 0.7.0 is out now: 400 pages (and burnout)

Hello everyone.

After some minimal quality assurance, I finally managed to bring to you those sweet sweet 400 pages of book. Here we will see a bit of what changed, what's new, what's old and what's happening.

Changelog

New subsections about creating your resources

In the resources section now you will find a subsection dedicated to explaining the ADSR envelope and how it works, from a theoretical point of view.

Also I added a new section where we look up close at a couple of basic rhythms to start you up composing some music, it's nothing special but it's a beginning.

Also we will talk about "normal mapping" and how it can really change the way your objects look and give them a more "immersive feeling".

We will talk more about AM/FM synthesis and their basic terms.

New algorithms

New code and algorithms have been added, including:

• Simulating Inertia
• Point to polygon collision detection
• Circle to polygon collision detection
• Line to polygon collision detection
• Polygon to Polygon collision detection
• Polygon fan triangulation

New "Miscellaneous" section in game design

I found myself wanting to talk about a couple of subjects that didn't really fit in any precise category, so I decided to add this section to talk about them. Here you will find some (not) legal advice, as well as autosaving in games.

Fixes... lots of fixes

I noticed a lot of mistakes in the book, as well as some outdated material, so I took the time to go through the whole book again to see if I could remove or update some of them. Also many typos are gone (and some more will probably have been added too), as well as some phrases that were difficult to understand.

Sequence diagrams

A whole new section has been dedicated to explaining UML sequence diagrams, which may be used in future to explain some interactions between objects or some design patterns. I feel sequence diagrams are underrated and underused in IT, as they can help you figure out how things work much better than just coding directly.

More Math and computer science!

With all the new content, it was inevitable that some more math would sneak its way into the book, same goes for computer science.

We will talk about how computers are actually less precise than we think them to be, how random numbers are not really random and how very small numbers can become a huge part of a result. Also recursion, and recursion, and recursion, and recursion...

Even more content

We will talk about "perceived fairness" in games, AABB-trees for broad-phase collision detection, backtracking, bouncing UI elements, color depth, straight lines and their equations, the separating axis theorem, projections, coupling...

Some images have been redone to make them clearer and just look better.

Also there is a brand new "note box", since I found myself abusing the "pitfall" box a lot for bringing just some notes to you. Now the Pitfall boxes will be used only for traps and common errors.

The burnout

Sadly, after all this work and content, as well as some events, I feel extremely burned out. I really wanted to bring a big update to the book and still keep a somewhat high level of quality but I think I hit my limit this time.

Version 0.7.0 will be the last version of "2D Game Development: From Zero To Hero" to come out for a while. I need to rest and reassess some things: I started giving this project and its performance too much weight on my own worth, feeling sad the days it didn't "perform well" and satisfied in the days it did.

This project will continue to receive updates in the future, just not the "near" kind of future: sadly I'm writing this mostly alone and filtering, simplifying and commenting content is not easy.

Conclusion

The project is going on a hiatus for a while, I will listen to suggestions so if you want feel free to open a topic on the forum section here on Itch. If you want to say hi, feel free to do so too, I will try my best to answer as much as possible.

Thank you everyone for reading, both this post and the book.

Stay safe and take care.

Penaz