Chapter 9 Serious Samantha versus the Zillion Zombies

In this chapter, you will learn an important new trick in video game programming: how to handle a ton of things in the game at once. For instance, showing a zillion zombies on the screen at once! This requires some programming wizardry that you’ll learn in this chapter—a very useful skill indeed! Most video games display a lot of things on the screen at once. In a typical arcade game, these game objects are often called sprites. A sprite is a small game character that moves around and does something. For instance, a spaceship is a sprite; the plasma bolts that it fires are sprites; the alien ships that it fights against are sprites. We are going to do some basic animation in this chapter too—just enough to make the zombies look like they’re walking.