That'll work. For the sake of your sanity, if you plan on doing large maps, then it might be worth plugging in code so you can load in your index array from a .bmp or something. Failing that, at the very least you could create your map from a string, so you could use the XOOOOXXOOO style notation. Something like:

[source lang="cpp"]const char *pGameMap[] =
{
"XXXXXOOOOOXXXXX",
"XXXXOOOOOOOXXXX",
};[/source]

You could convert that into a bool array, or just do your tests directly on the string seeing as a char is no bigger than a bool.

I still get confused by pointers.

Does the source code snippet create a constant of datatype char* and name it pGameMap[]? if so how can I assign a string to a char* type? That is overly complex for me to conceptualize without a little breakdown.

It's a little complicated to explain exactly what that code is doing. Essentially, each line of "XXXOOOXXX" becomes a NULL terminated string and pGameMap is an array of pointers that point to those strings, I used [] instead of specifying a size of the array so that the compiler can infer the number of strings by the number of entries. C Strings are simply an array of char (8 bit numbers) where a value of 0 indicates the end.

In terms of you using it, your sample code would become:

[source lang="cpp"]//assuming you are going up.
//translates well into all 4 directions.

if(pGameMap[cury-1][curx]=='O') {
cury-=1;
}
else {
//collision sound
}
[/source]
Other things to watch out for are that you would not be allowed to modify pGameMap at runtime which might be an issue if you want a dynamic world (you could copy the data from pGameMap and modify that though). Also I'd recommend throwing a few asserts into your code to make sure all the strings are the same length and that there's a safe border of X around the edge of the map.