DEV Community: Game Dev From Scratch

Why Write a Dev Log?

Sam Watkins — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 21:18:52 +0000

I have rarely ever kept a diary, although I know that it would be good for me. So why don't I do it? I guess I am not keen to write something each day, just for myself, if no one else is going to read it.

I also know that when I am working on a project, or learning something new, it would be a good idea to write and publish a dev log from the very beginning.

I realized this while reading about the video game Gunpoint. To my mind, Gunpoint was successful largely because the developer blogged about it starting very early on. He grew a community around the blog, and received feedback every step of the way. Many people contributed and helped him to improve his game, and I guess that most of his fans bought a copy when the game was finished!

It seems to me that blogging from the beginning is the single biggest factor, that can help a project such as an indie game to be successful. Even if the game turns out to be a flop, the blog itself might have value. Even so, I have not been able to write a substantial regular blog by myself. I have tried before, but I didn't keep it up.

This time is different.

My kids want to make a computer game, which sounds good to me; and I want them to learn some programming. Based on my own experience, creative programming is fun, it's good for the brains, and it can help children to learn and apply many topics in mathematics, well before they are covered at school. So I am teaching my kids how to program, we are learning to make games, and we are blogging about it as we go along.

I think that blogging can help us in many ways:

When we explain something to others, it helps us to learn.
We do better work when we are going to show it to people.
As we practise writing, we are learning to think clearly.
Writing is a very useful skill to develop in itself.
When we forget something, we can go back and revise it.
Other people may enjoy reading our posts.
Other people might learn something from reading our posts.
Other people can comment and might teach us something.
Feedback from our readers can guide us in a good direction.
Some people might join in and help us with the project.
We can make friends, and maybe build a little community.
One day we might turn our blog posts into a book.

Do you agree that it is useful to write a dev log?

Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Next post: Coming soon...
Previous post: Making a Christmas Tree, by Sean
Contents: Game Dev From Scratch

Making a Christmas Tree

Sean Watkins — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 12:34:25 +0000

Why make a Christmas tree in April? I don't know but it's harder than you might think, if you want a good one at least. To make a good Christmas tree you have to have at least four components the trunk, leaves, pot and baubles.

//Trunk
    colour(150, 75, 10);
    rect(378, 150, 44, 425);

The trunk is simple, a brown coloured rectangle. To make brown with RGB you have to make orange, red plus a little green. Then just reduce the numbers to make brown, which is, to the best of my knowledge, a dark orange.

//Leaves
    for (int y = 500; y >= 100; y = y - 20) {
        int w = y / 2;
        int h = y / 3;
                int green = 250 - y * 200 / 500; 
        colour(0, green, 0);
        tri(400 - w / 2, y, 400 + w / 2, y, 400, y - h);
    }

The Leaves are not as simple, I did some special things to make the trees leaves look like a golden cyprus.

I am making the tree out of triangles. The loop counts backwards from y = 500 to y = 100, 20 pixels at a time. I am starting at 500, which is near the bottom of the 800 × 600 canvas.

I calculate the width w and height h of the triangle based on the y coordinate, so that the triangles get smaller towards the top of the tree.

To make the tree become gradually lighter closer to the top of the canvas, I vary the amount of green based on the y coordinate. The y coordinate ranges from 100 to 500. First divide by 500 to make it approximately between 0 and 1. Then multiply by 200 to put it on the RGB scale from 0 to 255. Subtract from 250 so that the amount of green ranges roughly between 250 for the light green at the top of the tree, and 50 for the dark green at the bottom of the tree.

//Pot
    colour(75, 37, 10);
    quad(360, 530, 440, 530, 425, 590, 375, 590);

    colour(90, 45, 12);
    rect(355, 528, 90, 10);

Now we have a basic pine tree but it doesn't have a place to live... So let's put it in a comically small pot! All we need to do is put a quadrilateral with a smaller base for the body of the pot and a skinny rectangle at the top to be the brim.

//BAUBLES
    srandom(6);
    for (int i = 0; i < 36; i++) {
        if (i % 2) {
            colour(255, 0, 0);
        } else {
            colour(255, 200, 0);
        }
        int x, y;
        int w;
        do {
            y = random() % 433 + 67;
            x = random() % 250 + 275;
            w = y / 2;
        } while (x < 400 - w/2 || x > 400 + w/2);
        circle(x, y, 10);
    }

Finally, we have to show that is isn't just a pine tree, so let's add some baubles. To be honest I didn't program this, my dad did, and I have no idea how this was done. So let's hand over to dad:

We want to draw 36 baubles, so we have a loop to count from i = 0 to 35. The odd numbered ones where i % 2 == 1 are red, and the even numbered ones are gold, but we can't make them shiny, at least not today.

We choose a random point in a rectangle that surrounds the tree, its "bounding box", then work out the width of the tree at that y position. If the point is to the left or right of the tree, it tries again with a new random point using a do ... while loop.

Finally, we draw a small circle of radius 10 pixels at the chosen point.

The srandom(6) call at the top of this section seeds the random number generator. Seeding with a constant value like this gives us the same pattern of baubles each time we run the program. Number 6 happened to give a fairly good looking pattern.

Here is the full code to draw the Christmas tree.

Next post: Why Write a Dev Log?, by Sam
Previous post: Creating Drawings, by Thalia
Contents: Game Dev From Scratch

Creating Drawings

Thalia Watkins — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 11:43:34 +0000

A few days ago I created these house and ant drawings using C, with help from my father. I made these drawings by using x and y coordinates in a 800 by 600 canvas. I added in colours using the primary colours in programming which are red, green and blue. This is slighly different from painting because you are mixing different shades of light together.

house.c

#include "basic.h"

void draw(void)
{
    // sky
    colour(0, 100, 250);
    rect(0, 0, 800, 500);

    // sun
    colour(200, 200, 50);
    circle(100 + frame, 100, 70);

    // grass
    colour(0, 250, 100);
    rect(0, 500, 800, 100);

    // house
    colour(200, 50, 30);
    rect(200, 300, 400, 300);

    // door
    colour(250, 120, 100);
    rect(340, 400, 120, 200);

    // windows
    colour(80, 150, 200);
    circle(270, 400, 50);
    circle(530, 400, 50);

    // roof
    colour(170, 30, 20);
    tri(400, 100, 650, 310, 150, 310);
}

This is my house program, a simple program to draw a house. I will explain how I did this step by step.

On the first line we have written #include "basic.h". This is a library we wrote which allows us to draw simple shapes such as rectangles, circles and triangles, and add colour into our program. The function names are abbreviated to rect and tri while circle stays the same.

void draw (void) is the main fuction in this program.

First I set the drawing colour using the colour function, for example colour(0, 100, 250). These numbers represent red, green and blue in that order. The numbers go from 0 to 255, 255 being very bright and 0 being nothing. When you want another colour you can combine multiple colours to make something different.

The next thing to do after you have made your colour is to create the shape that will hold that colour. I had the options to chose from rectangle, circle and triangle. I chose a rectangle for the main part of the house. The rect function takes four numbers which have different meanings, while circle takes only three numbers, and tri takes six. For the rectangle these numbers represent the x and y coordinates of the top left corner and the width and height. For the circle they are the x and y coordinates of the center and the radius. For the triangle it has x and y coordinates for each corner of the triangle.

You may have noticed under the sun category next to the x coordinate of the circle it says + frame. This makes it move to the right side frame by frame. If you did this to the y coordinate it would move down.

ant.c

#include "basic.h"

void draw(void)
{
    // ground
    colour(0, 110, 20);
    rect(0, 0, 800, 600);

    // front legs
    colour(200, 190, 0);
    line_width = 10;
    line(460, 300, 450, 400);
    line(460, 300, 450, 200);
    line(450, 200, 460, 60);
    line(450, 400, 460, 540);

    // middle legs
    colour(200, 100, 0);
    line(430, 300, 370, 420);
    line(430, 300, 370, 180);
    line(370, 180, 240, 120);
    line(370, 420, 240, 480);

    // back legs
    line(330, 380, 430, 300);
    line(330, 220, 430, 300);
    line(330, 220, 120, 200);
    line(330, 380, 120, 400);

    // thorax
    colour(110, 40, 10);
    circle(409, 300, 32);

    colour(130, 60, 10);
    circle(460, 300, 30);

    // neck
    colour(100, 30, 0);
    line_width = 30;
    line(470, 300, 550, 300);

    // head
    colour(0, 160, 20);
    circle(560, 300, 50);

    // abdomen
    colour(0, 200, 20);
    circle(330, 300, 50);
    tri(320, 350, 220, 300, 320, 250);

    // eyes
    colour(0, 0, 0);
    circle(560, 255, 17);
    circle(560, 345, 17);

    colour(255, 255, 255);
    circle(570, 255, 3);
    circle(570, 345, 3);

    // antennae
    line_width = 10;
    colour(100, 30, 0);
    line(580, 270, 595, 200);
    line(580, 330, 595, 400);
    line(593, 400, 750, 450);
    line(593, 200, 750, 150);
}

This is my ant program which is quite similar to the last one I explained so I will only cover the new information, which is mostly about lines.

With lines you can change the width just like this: line_width = 10. If we change the 10 to some other number, making the number smaller makes the line thinner, making the number larger makes the line thicker.

We used lines 10 pixels wide to draw the ant's legs and antennae, and a 30 pixel wide line to draw the ant's neck.

Next post: Making a Christmas Tree, by Sean
Previous post: kisskit: Simplifying Game Dev in C, by Sam
Contents: Game Dev From Scratch

Game Dev From Scratch

Sam Watkins — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 16:07:15 +0000

G'day, welcome to our blog!

We are Sam, Sean and Thalia, from Melbourne, Australia. We are learning about programming and game development, and writing about it here in this blog.

Creating Games, by Sean
Deciding on a Programming Language for Game Dev, by Sam
My Simple Programs, by Thalia
Loops and Math in C, by Sean
Basic Programming in C, by Sam
kisskit: Simplifying Game Dev in C, by Sam
Creating Drawings, by Thalia
Making a Christmas Tree, by Sean
Why Write a Dev Log?, by Sam

Loops and Math in C

Sean Watkins — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 09:16:55 +0000

I have over the last couple days, been learning more about the basics of C the programming language! Let me recap what I've learned for you.

I have already, similar to my sister (thalia), learned the very basics such as how to use the standard input/output library #include <stdio.h> and printf("Hello, world");.

To see more about this, please read Thalia's post.

loops.c

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
        printf("Hello, Jerome. ");
    }

    int i = 0;

    while (i <= 1000) {
        printf("%d ", i);
        i = i + 1;
    }

    return 0;
}

I wrote a for loop to print a message 100 times, and a while loop to print the numbers from 0 to 1000 using the %d format to print integers in decimal.

In the for loop, all of the loop control is in one place, whereas in the while loop the initializer, test and increment are scattered around the code.

maths.c

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(void)
{
    char *star_name = "Proxima Centauri";
    double star_distance_ly = 4.2465;
    double c = 299792458;
    double seconds_in_year = 3600 * 24 * 365.2422;
    double light_year = c * seconds_in_year;
    double star_distance_km = star_distance_ly * light_year / 1000;

    printf("The distance to %s is %.0f km.\n", star_name, star_distance_km);

    return 0;
}

This is probably already apparent, but maths is an extremely important part of any programming language, especially if you want to make games. This is why I thought a good next step would be to see if I could make simple calculations through C. I have, again, been watching more Kurzgesagt videos on YT. Inevitably I found many great videos on their channel about space and our universe, this got me wondering about the closest stars to our own.

This little program converts the distance to the closet star from light-years to kilometres. I used double variables; these are double-precision floating point numbers. We can print a double with %f and rounded off to a whole number with %.0f for 0 decimal places.

Next post: Basic Programming in C, by Sam
Previous post: My Simple Programs, by Thalia
Contents: Game Dev From Scratch

Basic Programming in C

Sam Watkins — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 19:52:38 +0000

I am teaching my kids Sean and Thalia how to program in C, so that we can create video games together. They are learning to use some of the same tools that I use myself, namely Debian GNU/Linux, xterm, bash, vim, cc, make, and git.

Here's a summary of what we did to get started, and some of the things we've learned so far.

Setup

We created a page on github, so we can share our code.
We created a page on dev.to, so we can write blog posts in the same place. We think it's a good idea to write about what we are doing, and hopefully some people will follow our progress.
I installed some libraries we will need on our computers:

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-gfx-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev \
    libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev libglew-dev

For each of my kids, I did the following setup:

Created a github account.
Added to our github organization.
Created an RSA ssh key with ssh-keygen.
Copied the ssh private and public keys to our other PC.
Added the ssh public key to the github account. This enables us to push changes to github.
Created a dev.to account using github to log in.

For each of my kids, on each of our two main PCs:

Created a user account.
Logged into Chrome sync.
Logged into github and dev.to.
Disabled programmable completion in ~/.bashrc. I find it annoying when bash won't complete filenames because it's trying to do something clever.
Cloned our two git repositories:

git clone git@github.com:gamedevfromscratch/gamedev.git
git clone git@github.com:gamedevfromscratch/kisskit.git

Basic shell commands

We learned a few basic shell commands:

ls lists files in the current directory.
cd foo "changes directory" to foo.
cd by itself goes back to the home directory.
tree shows a tree of files and directories.
vi file.c opens file.c in the vim editor (see below).
We can stop a job, such as vim, with ctrl-Z.
fg stands for "foreground", it continues the stopped job.

We can use the up and down arrows to look at previous commands, change them if needed, and run them again.

We can also use ctrl-R for a reverse search through the command history, and ctrl-S to search forwards again... but read how to fix ctrl-S first!

Basic editing in vim

Vim has several editing modes. It starts in "normal mode".
Before typing a program, press i to enter "insert mode".
To save changes, go back to "normal mode" by pressing Esc, then type :w for write, and press enter.
Enter :q to quit the editor, or :q! to exit without saving changes.
When we press : to enter a command like :w, vim goes into "command mode".

Copy-paste in vim

We can select lines using the mouse to select text. Triple-click then drag to select whole lines. Or we can press v for "visual mode" or capital V for "visual line mode", and select lines with the arrow keys.
Press y to "yank" or copy the selected lines.
You can also press d to "delete" or cut the selected lines.
Move to above where you want to paste the lines, using the mouse or arrow keys.
Press p to paste the copied lines below.
When we need to move to a different point in the file, it is generally better to use the mouse, not the arrow keys.

Compiling and running a C program

My daughter described some of the first simple programs she wrote in her post, My Simple Programs.

After we have entered a program, and saved it by pressing Esc then :w, we need to stop the editor and go back to the shell, with ctrl-Z.

Then we compile the program. The simplest command to do this is:

cc -o hello hello.c

This creates an executable called hello from the source code file hello.c. If we omit the -o hello, and just type cc hello.c, the compiler will name the executable a.out, which is not very useful.

The compiler will tell us if there are any errors.

If it compiles successfully, we can run our hello program like this:

./hello

We need to write ./hello not just hello, because for safety reasons the shell does not normally look for programs to run in the current directory; who knows what sort of dangerous programs might be lurking around, pretending to be ls or vi?

The compiler will give us better warnings about things that might be wrong with our program, if we run it like this:

cc -o hello -Wall hello.c

The -Wall stands for "warnings: all".

After testing our program, we can go back to the stopped editor by entering fg.

Sometimes we need to "link" with other C libraries. For example, if our program wants to use the sqrt function to calculate a square root, we need to link with the math library. The option for this is -lm. This is the full command to compile a program call math.c and link with the math library:

cc -o math -Wall math.c -lm

Using the compiler is a bit difficult, so I wrote a wrapper script called ccw for "C compiler with warnings". This runs the compiler with all the options and libraries we might need. For example:

ccw hello

We can also use a program called make to run the compiler, taking options and commands from a Makefile. We'll look at how to do this in another post.

Demo program

Before getting my kids to write their own programs, I wrote a quick demo program to show them some basic stuff in C:

basic "Hello, world"
string variables, say hello with the person's name
int variable, math multiplying
for loop, print several times
if, print different messages odd and even
modulo operator % for the remainder after division
subroutines: rep, nl
function: pythagores
What's the difference between subroutine and a function?
the kids wrote a subroutine: praise
REPEAT macro, for a simpler loop

This is the demo program we wrote. It's a bit of a mess, but shows several features of the language:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <math.h>

void rep(char c, int n)
{
    for (int i=0; i<n; i++)
        putchar(c);
}

void nl(void)
{
    putchar('\n');
}

float pythagores(float x, float y)
{
    return sqrt(x*x + y*y);
}

#define REPEAT(n) for (int i=0; i<10; i++)

void praise(int n, char *name)
{
    for(int i=0; i<n; i++) {
        printf("%s is the best.  ", name);
    }
    nl();
    nl();
}

int main(void)
{
    char *name1 = "Thalia";
    char *name2 = "Sean";

    srandom(time(NULL));

    int a = random() % 11 + 2;
    int b = random() % 11 + 2;

    praise(50, "Nika");
    praise(30, "Sam");
    praise(25, "Sean");
    praise(20, "Thalia");

    nl();
    nl();

    for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
        if (i % 2 == 0)
            printf("hello %s %d*%d=%d\n", name1, a, b, a*b);
        else
            printf("hello %s %d\n", name2, i);
    }

    nl();
    nl();

    int size = 10;
    for (int i=0; i<size; i++) {
        rep(' ', size-i);
        rep('*', i*2+1);
        nl();
    }

    for (int i=size-2; i>=0; i--) {
        rep(' ', size-i);
        rep('*', i*2+1);
        nl();
    }

    nl();
    nl();

    printf("pythagores(30, 40) = %f\n", pythagores(30, 40));

    return 0;
}

Next post: kisskit: Simplifying Game Dev in C, by Sam
Previous post: Loops and Math in C, by Sean
Contents: Game Dev From Scratch

kisskit: Simplifying Game Dev in C

Sam Watkins — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 09:06:07 +0000

I grew up programming in BASIC in the 1980s, and enjoyed a very simple API for graphics and sound. For example, this draws a line and a circle:

MOVE 100, 100
DRAW 300, 200
CIRCLE 300, 200, 50

To do the same in modern JavaScript with HTML in the browser, without any helper functions, we would have to write:

<canvas id="myCanvas" width="800" height="600"
 style="width: 800px; height: 600px; background: black;"></canvas>
<script>
const canvas = document.getElementById('myCanvas');
const context = canvas.getContext('2d');

context.strokeStyle = 'white';

context.beginPath();
context.moveTo(100, 100);
context.lineTo(300, 200);
context.stroke();

context.beginPath();
context.arc(300, 200, 50, 0, 2 * Math.PI, false);
context.stroke();
</script>

And in C with SDL2_gfx, we would need something like this:

#include <SDL.h>
#include <SDL2/SDL2_gfxPrimitives.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdbool.h>

int main(void)
{
        int exit_status = EXIT_FAILURE;
        char *title = "SDL Demo";
        SDL_Window *window;
        SDL_Renderer *renderer;
        bool quit = 0;
        SDL_Event e;

        SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO);
        window = SDL_CreateWindow(title, 50, 50, 800, 600, 0);
        renderer = SDL_CreateRenderer(window, -1,
                SDL_RENDERER_ACCELERATED |
                SDL_RENDERER_PRESENTVSYNC);
        if (!renderer)
                goto error;

        SDL_SetRenderDrawColor(renderer, 0, 0, 0, 255);
        SDL_RenderClear(renderer);
        lineRGBA(renderer, 100, 100, 300, 200,
                 255, 255, 255, 255);
        circleRGBA(renderer, 300, 200, 50,
                   255, 255, 255, 255);

        SDL_RenderPresent(renderer);

        while (!quit) {
                SDL_WaitEvent(&e);
                if (e.type == SDL_QUIT)
                        quit = 1;
        }

        exit_status = EXIT_SUCCESS;
error:
        SDL_DestroyWindow(window);
        SDL_Quit();
        exit(exit_status);
}

I don't want my kids to suffer so very much more than I did, so I'm putting together kisskit, a set of tools to help simplify C programming and game dev as much as possible.

KISS stands for "Keep it simple, stupid!" and this is very good advice for programming.

Kisskit is a work in progress. So far, it includes three main features:

macros for logging and debugging
macros to wrap library functions and check for errors
a library called "basic" to enable writing simple games using SDL behind the scenes

Here is a comparison of a simple program written with and without our kiss.h macros for logging and error handling.

Returning to our original graphics challenge, here is the same program to draw a line and a circle using our basic library. All of the SDL boilerplate code is hidden behind the scenes, and our main program is simple enough that a child could write it.

The library uses a linking trick so that we can override only the functions that we need. In this case, just draw():

#include "basic.h"

void draw(void)
{
        line(100, 100, 300, 200);
        circle0(300, 200, 50);
}

We are able to write simple code similar to BASIC, the Processing language, or p5.js, but in plain C.

In the next few posts, we'll show how we can draw pictures and make a simple game using this library.

Next post: Creating Drawings, by Thalia
Previous post: Basic Programming in C, by Sam
Contents: Game Dev From Scratch

My Simple Programs

Thalia Watkins — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 10:16:04 +0000

Recently I've been learning how to create some basic programs in the C programming language with my father and brother.

hello.c

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
        printf("Hello, world\n");
        return 0;
}

This is the first program we wrote, which says "Hello, world". On the first line we included stdio which is a library of functions. "stdio" stands for standard input / output.

The next part of our program is the main function. Every C program must have a main function to work.

int stands for integer, which is a whole number. The line int main(void) means that our main function returns a whole number to say if the function worked or failed. It returns 0 if it worked, or any other number if it failed.

The void means that we ignore any extra words on the command-line.

The printf stands for print formatted. This is a function that we use to output words. The \n at the end of the string stands for newline, it moves onto the next line.

The last of the function return 0; means that our program succeeded.

hello_name.c

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
        char *name = "Bongo2";

        printf("Hello %s\n", name);
}

In our second program, we changed it so that we print someone's name instead of "world", for example, "Bongo2". We created a string variable called name, and set it to "Bongo2".

In the printf %s stands for a string. In this case, the string is the name variable, which we set to "Bongo2".

maths.c

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
        int a = 18;
        int b = 6;

        printf("The answer is %d\n", a * b);
}

The last program we wrote was to do with maths. We used two int variables called a and b, and gave them the values 18 and 6.

The %d in the printf format string is going to print a whole number. The "d" stands for decimal or base 10. The number it prints is a calculation, a times b, which equals 108.

Next post: Loops and Math in C, by Sean
Previous post: Deciding on a Programming Language for Game Dev, by Sam
Contents: Game Dev From Scratch

Deciding on a Programming Language for Game Dev

Sam Watkins — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 12:24:21 +0000

Our first step in learning how to make games was to decide on which programming language to use. I am an experienced software developer, so I guided this decision.

This is Game Dev From Scratch, and we want to learn about programming. We don't want to use a game maker tool or a third-party engine, at least not in the beginning. We would like our game to run in the browser, so that people can discover and play it easily. We have lofty goals, so we want to use a high-performance language.

Typically browser games are written in JavaScript. I don't mind JavaScript, and I use it for front-end web development. JavaScript has dynamic typing, but I believe that static typing is advantageous for all but the smallest projects. This stackoverflow page explains the difference. JavaScript is not a slow language, but it's not the quickest either.
TypeScript is JavaScript with static typing bolted on. The transpiler is slow. It was developed by Microsoft. Call me a bigot, but I don't like Microsoft, and I don't like TypeScript!
I do much of my professional work in Python. I really like the light-weight syntax, without all those pesky braces and semicolons. Python is great for experiments, and has been adopted by the scientific and artificial intelligence communities. Although Python has some excellent and very fast libraries for mathematics, scientific computing, and AI, the Python language itself is much slower than JavaScript, and for that reason I don't think that it's ideal for game development.
Mainstream stand-alone games are often written in C++. C++ has been described as an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog. When invited to reflect on whether he should have written git in C++, Linus Torvalds retorted that:

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.
If C is a dog, it's a good old dog. The C programming language was created by Dennis Ritchie in the early 1970s. In my opinion, just about every programming language that has come after C is largely inferior to C, and none is wholly superior to it. It is not so easy to get started with C compared to Python for example, but I believe that I can make up for that with some helpful libraries and syntactic sugar.

Can we make a browser game written in C? According to Mozilla's Game development page, yes we can. We can compile C or C++ to WebAssembly using a tool called emscripten, and WebAssembly runs much faster than JavaScript in the browser.

As I understand, the popular SDL2 library has been ported to work with emscripten. Using SDL2 and OpenGL, we can build a browser version of our game, and native versions for the major platforms, all from the same code base. I have some prior experience with SDL2 and OpenGL.

In summary, we considered several different programming languages for learning about game development, and we decided to use C:

JavaScript – good for web, dynamic typing, not the quickest.
TypeScript – I don't like it.
Python – beautiful syntax, but it's too slow.
C++ – Linus doesn't like it.
C is the worst programming language – except for all the others that have been tried.

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Previous post: Creating Games, by Sean
Contents: Game Dev From Scratch

Creating Games

Sean Watkins — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 10:47:58 +0000

Recently, I have found myself wanting more and more to be able to play this game my imagination conjured up, a fast-paced multiplayer strategy game, in which you would be in charge of an entire ant colony, fighting against other ant colonies, gathering resources and becoming the strongest ant colony ever.

The only problem is that unsurprisingly, I couldn't find a game that was similar enough to the one I imagined that could satisfy my peculiar desire to command an army of ants and crush other inferior colonies! This is why, together with my sister and father, I have decided to learn how to create video games.

We are starting by learning how to program in C. Then we intend to develop our skills by making some simple games, and work towards the goal of creating an online multiplayer game based on the ant colony idea. We are writing about our progress here on this blog.

I first got the inspiration for this idea when I was watching a YouTube video made by Kurzgesagt (see below) explaining the life and daily struggle of weaver ants. The weaver ants create cities in the sky, with many castles high in the tree canopy, and bridges connecting to outposts at their borders.

I found it extremely interesting because although each individual is almost mindless, together these incredible ants work as one to accomplish amazing things. The ant colony reminds me of the second most complex system in our bodies, the immune system, where many mindless cells cooperate to defend the body.

Please follow along if you like the idea or are also interested in making games. Thanks for reading!

Next post: Deciding on a Programming Language for Game Dev, by Sam
Contents: Game Dev From Scratch

DEV Community: Game Dev From Scratch

Why Write a Dev Log?

Making a Christmas Tree

Creating Drawings

house.c

ant.c

Game Dev From Scratch

Other links

Loops and Math in C

loops.c

maths.c

Basic Programming in C

Setup

Basic shell commands

Basic editing in vim

Copy-paste in vim

Compiling and running a C program

Demo program

kisskit: Simplifying Game Dev in C

My Simple Programs

hello.c

hello_name.c

maths.c

Deciding on a Programming Language for Game Dev

Creating Games