Book needed on side scrollers, AI, logic

Hi all,

I am looking for a decent book or two on game development for someone with fair OOP programming experience.

The book should give guidance on the the following subjects:
* What to do in the core game loop?
* Handling animations (in the core game loop).
* Handling events, or triggered events.
* Something about artificial intelligence.
* Ideally, some tips about multiplayer integration.
* Going about with various exceptions (which makes the game).
* Working with tilemaps.
* Enemies moving on a tilemap.
* All of the above in a OOP approach.
* preferred is the main focus design of above, with code examples.

Basically a book which can show me how to make a core (resuseable) game engine for use in 2D side scroller games.

Which books can you recommend? I need something which can get me up to speed in a day or 3 of reading.

One could google lotsa bits-n-pieces 2gether from various sources however then its chaos. My dayjob + worktraveltime etc leaves me with very few spare hours per week for puzzling out code etc. A decent book can get me up to speed.

I have a fair programming ability in the past 8 years working in business software in banks/transportation/utilities etc etc.

The book Begginers Game Developemnt with BlitzMax (discussed here on this forum) game dev seems very very good though not all topics are covered or after all it does?


Any ideas? TIA.

http://www.ai-junkie.com/books/index.html
I own those two books and can really recommend "Programming Game AI by Example".

with 8 years of experience it seems you're looking for a primer for getting into game development and what type of mindset to use when programming games. I really haven't seen a book that covers those topics all under one cover with enough detail. Animation and AI, for instance, can be books on their own and are still active fields of research today.

I would think the very best way to ease into it would be to do a very simple game on your own.

I know you'd prefer a book, but this set of online tutorials is pretty thorough and all in one place so you don't have to google around everywhere, and it's all by the same author.

http://www.blitzmax.com/Community/posts.php?topic=59509

It's written for blitzmax and can get you started and up to speed in a very short amount of time. It covers the very basics needed for creating a 2D game. It shows a basic main loop and its structure.