Calebe94

Calebe94

How about making a game?

4 min read

How about making a game?

Recently a friend of mine started taking a Unity course, and during a chat we got really excited about making a game.

I was super excited to make a game in C, while he (Rafael) wanted to develop the game in Unity. I don’t judge him for that, but I’m not very familiar with C#, so I didn’t want to go the Unity route.

The Plan

My plan is to learn how a game works — every step of the creation process, in short, EVERYTHING.

Not only that, but I’d love to make a game that’s 100% FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

Engines

After doing some research on engines, I didn’t have as much success as I’d hoped.

I found some Open Source engines like Source, used by Valve to create Counter Strike, Portal, and Half-Life.

I also found an engine called Godot, written in C++, but it uses its own syntax for developing games, called GDNative.

So, I decided to go my own way — I’ll build my game from SCRATCH, creating the engine in parallel.

DIY

There are some advantages to building your own engine. I’ll list a few below:

  • Better performance;
  • Smaller codebase;
  • Full control over the code;

In short, TOTAL CONTROL OVER EVERYTHING — even the bugs.

And I’m also aware that this “Total control” can be a disadvantage too, since I’ll have to study everything about game development — entity management, collisions, camera, dialogue management, and more.

But since my focus is to learn how a game works, this disadvantage becomes a painful advantage.

SDL2

After more research, I watched the talk Game Development with SDL 2.0 (Steam Dev Days 2014) on YouTube and discovered it’s possible to develop games using the SDL2 library, which I had already used to simulate a graphics library for embedded systems called LVGL.

With SDL2 I would create a virtual display to demonstrate the graphical elements, without having to flash the firmware onto the device every time I made a change.

The first thing that crossed my mind was: why not make a game from scratch using the SDL2 library?

And that’s where I’ll start.

What game?

But then came the question: what game? How can I make a game if I don’t even have an idea of what I want to build?

So, chatting with my friends, we established some “constraints” for the game concept. Here they are:

  • Pixel art graphics (8/16 bits);
  • Top-down view;
  • Survival and exploration game with Farm Simulator vibes (farming game);
    • a slightly “cozier” survival game, in the style of Stardew Valley;
    • and exploration in the style of Minecraft, where the world is generated procedurally, and it’s up to the player to explore the world looking for resources;
    • the player can customize these islands with items that will be crafted;
    • natural resources in the game are finite, forcing the player to build farms;

On top of that, I also had the idea of adding natural elements from Brazilian fauna and flora — trees, plants, and animals commonly found in Brazil (not necessarily native ones).

Development tools

Below I’ll list some tools I plan to use during game development.

Graphics

I’ll use the SDL2 - Simple DirectMedia Layer library.

Programming language

I’ll be using the C programming language. However, I’ll use Python and Shell Script to write some tools, or whenever it’s convenient.

Static code analysis

Since I’ll be programming the game in C and using the gcc compiler, I’ll use the -fanalyzer flag to perform static code analysis.

Details on how gcc static analysis works can be found at: Static analysis in GCC 10 | Red Hat Developer.

Complete descriptions of error/warning codes can be found at https://cwe.mitre.org.

Information on how to use the -fanalyzer flag is available on the GNU/gcc documentation site.

UI

To generate the game’s UI, I’ll use the Nuklear library.

Other links:

Schedule

There’s no schedule — I only have a vague idea of what I want to do. The one thing I’m sure of is that I have time to change my mind.

On this blog I’ll record my adventures in the world of game development.

See you soon!!!

Updates

  • 05/13/2022:
    • I discovered that Godot has third-party Python support. The project is called godot-python.
    • I forgot to mention that we’re keeping a collective note with game ideas, tools, tutorials, and videos we’ve been finding. The note can be accessed through this link.

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