To get the most out of this book

You will be developing a full project through the chapters of this book, and while you can just read the chapters, I highly recommend you practice all the steps in this project as you advance through the book, to get the experience needed to properly learn the concepts demonstrated here. The chapters are designed so you can customize the game and not create the exact game shown in the book. However, consider not deviating too much from the main idea.

The project files are split into a folder per chapter and are designed in a cumulative way, each folder having just the new files introduced by the chapter or the changed ones. This means, for example, that if a file hasn't change since Chapter 1, you won't find it in Chapter 2 onward; those chapters will just use the file introduced in Chapter 1. This allows you to see just what we changed in each chapter, easily identifying the needed changes, and if for some reason you can't finish, for example, Chapter 3, you can just continue with Chapter 4's steps on top of Chapter 3. Also note that Chapters 15 to 19 will have two versions of the files, the C# ones and the Visual Scripting ones.

While we will see how to use XCode 12, is not required for most of the chapters. Also, there are alternatives to Visual Studio in Linux, like Visual Studio Code.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.