13: Let’s Program A Game! Part 1.

Follow along as I explain how to program a word guessing game in C++. This episode builds on a free 5-day email course that shows you step-by-step how to design and build WordGuess. You can get the 5 daily emails by signing up at takeupcode.com/wordguess. Each email will explain how the program evolved and give you the exact source code for each step. You’ll get your first email right away and each additional email will arrive a day later. I mention in the podcast that this is not like a book that breaks down a complete program into smaller pieces and explains how everything works. What I meant is this is not just like a book that breaks down a program into smaller pieces. It’s more than what a book can provide. The email course does explain things in small pieces. But it’s also a journey that we take together. You get to see how a method initially gets written and then how it changes over time. You can also get the emails by sending a text message with the message: wordless to the short United States number 44222. You should get a reply right away asking for your email address. If you signup using this method, just help me have some patience because it’s not fully automated and I will need to add your email address manually to my email system so that you can start receiving the course. The link above that goes to the Take Up Code website is fully automated and you’ll get your first email right after you confirm your subscription. This email course came directly from one of my live weekend classes where we built this game from scratch in about 3 hours. I hope you get value and I also hope it will encourage you to start programming. Listen to the full episode or read the full transcript below. Transcript There’s many ways to learn and we all have our favorite. The most effective way to truly master a skill is to make use of many different learning techniques. Listening to an audio podcast is great, but it’s just one technique. In this episode, we break away from the programming concepts that I’ve been explaining and focus on an actual project. The game is called WordGuess and it’s simple really. I recently used this exact game in one of the Take Up Code live weekend C++ classes. It took 3 hours to go from a blank project to a playable game and that was including the time that I devoted to explaining concepts along the way. You can get the 5 daily emails by signing up at takeupcode.com/wordguess. Each email will explain how the program evolved and give you the exact source code for each step. You’ll get your first email right away and each additional email will arrive a day later. This is not like a book that breaks down a complete program into smaller pieces and explains how everything works. No. This is a journey that we take together. You get to see how a method initially gets written and then how it changes over time. You can also get the emails by sending a text message with the message wordguess to the short United States number 44222. That’s wordguess, w o r d g u e s s to the number 44222. You should get a reply right away asking for your email address. This is a new system that I just setup for your convenience so if you take this approach, you’ll need to give me some time. It’s not fully automated yet. If you’re listening to this podcast at a later date, then I might have figured out how to get two separate automated systems to work together by then and you might get your first email right away. Until then, my phone messaging system can only send me an email with your email address. I then need to add your email address manually to my email system so that you can start receiving the course. If you’re using an Android phone or are listening to this podcast from outside of the United States, then you might not be able to send text messages to special 5 digit numbers like this. I know that some Android phones block these numbers and