How to make a game from scratch without dying of old age
There are an infinite amount of problems to solve.
Yet, only a handful of them will bring you closer to releasing a game.
I wish there were a simple (and actually good) game development from scratch course I could point you towards. But sadly nothing exists yet (that I’m aware of).
A good starting point for learning solid C fundamentals is https://guide.handmadehero.org/intro-to-c/
There’s a lot of windows-specific stuff in there which can be useful to know (assuming you’re on windows). For the most part though, skip over it and just focus on the fundamentals of C.
As a general rule of thumb, avoid all modern C++ like the plague and figure out how to do the equivalent thing (like std::string, or std::vector) with simple fundamentals (fixed length strings, or flat arrays).
sidenote: If you’re coming from C++ and are leaning heavily on the standard library (like I was), I found that forcing myself into C was a really smart move.
Save yourself a couple of wasted years by never learning OOP and skipping straight to learning the fundamentals of computing.
If you’re in the unfortunate position of having already learnt OOP (like myself), you will need to try your best to unlearn it.
Beyond simple programming, making an actual game in C is a whole beast in itself. And there isn’t really any resources I know of that cover this from start to finish.
You can try working your way through some of Casey’s Handmade Hero series - https://guide.handmadehero.org/
But with that you’ve got to be careful of catching “engine brain” and getting ratholed for years on interesting tech challenges that don’t really amount to anything.
Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVvZlH5gPAU
Beyond that. I don’t have a good answer aside from just trial and error, while seeking as many mentors as possible and asking a fuck load of questions.
For that, here are some good places to do so:
tech-related:
Ryan’s discord server https://www.rfleury.com/ (which’ll probably require a $5/month investment to his Substack if you want to be nice)
Searching via the Handmade hero episode guide can be helpful for tech-related stuff.
For game-design stuff and actually getting into the shipping / playtesting mindset, I’ve been getting a lot of experience with this over the last 6 months and I’m happy to field any questions you might have. I’ve got a private section of my discord dedicated to this. It’s paywalled off via patreon to stop a flood of people (and also to fill my pockets of course, man’s gotta eat).
The rest of this page is just a bunch of concepts I’ve loosely organised.
Enjoy!
Memory Management
A nice video clip to intro to the overall issue: https://hero.handmade.network/episode/code/day626/#4408
Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator
@ good example of how arenas can be passed as parameters
@ great example of a growable entity allocator with a free list
@ per-thread scratch arenas
“Learning how to work with arenas entirely revolutionized my experience with writing code in C. I almost never think about memory management, these days—it is not particularly more cumbersome than writing in a garbage-collected scripting language. Unlike such a language, however, I know where my memory is coming from, and when it’ll be “released”, and what that even means.” - rjf
Solid written overview - https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2019/02/01/memory-allocation-strategies-001/
Solid implementation walk-thru - https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2019/02/08/memory-allocation-strategies-002/
misc
A bunch of engine programming stuff from JBlow
Sokol for an easy and solid foundation (platform, input, sound, etc)
https://easings.net/ - easing functions cheat sheet
https://gafferongames.com/#posts - lots of goodies in here
John Carmack on Functional Programming
graphics programming
If I were starting out, I’d just use Sokol with sokol-gp instead of worrying about learning graphics programming straight away.
When ready though…
https://learnopengl.com/ - especially for the coordinate systems / transformation matrix explanations
I just use d3d11 since I’m only targeting Windows on Steam since that’s around ~98% of users. It simplifies things greatly. One target.
d3d11 specific:
http://www.directxtutorial.com/Lesson.aspx?lessonid=11-4-1 (solid fundamentals)
https://graphicsprogramming.github.io/learnd3d11/ (might find something useful in here?)
basic setup example using the C API
Minimal D3D11
https://github.com/Microsoft/DirectXTK/wiki/Getting-Started - good for examples on the more advanced stuff (ignore the C++ cringe)
Shader examples
HLSL reference
some fun - https://alaingalvan.gitbook.io/a-trip-through-the-graphics-pipeline/
(for correctly mapping a texture without edge bleed)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d9/texture-coordinates
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d9/directly-mapping-texels-to-pixels
lighting
A better point light attenuation function
audio programming
Save yourself the pain of writing bytes to a sound buffer and just use FMOD. It’s unparalleled when it comes to getting soundscapes for games up and running. It’s what I’m shipping with in my game.
The other big daddy is Wise, but from what I’ve seen FMOD is more accessible when starting out.
Now, if you really do want to go down the DIY route because you think it might be fun…
Lessons Learned from a Decade of Audio Programming is a banger
Introduction to Sound Mixing
@ - mixing sounds together, clipping, modulation & interpolation, pitch
implementation is in the following days here (from day 139)
https://tek256.com/posts/game-audio/ - decent overview of some of the terms wrt game dev
low pass filter
It was at this point that I realised doing it myself is a stupid idea. Writing all these filters from scratch is silly. I wanted more complex mixing at my fingertips, while staying in the game / sound design space (instead of the engine brain tooling space)… hence FMOD.
Ryan Fleury
Ryan deserves his own section because he’s an absolute unit of a man.
His Substack is a gold-mine. If you become a member, his community discord is a great place to ask questions and get sensible answers
UI Series
Confronting combinatorics - flags vs switches
Jai Programming
If you’re in the beta, the how_to is king. Also don’t forget to go through every single module to get a feel for what’s already been done. I was a silly goose and didn’t do this, so I ended up writing my own custom arena allocator… only to realise that Flat_Pool was a thing. RIP.
other helpful community stuff:
The Way to Jai - great starting point
Jai Community Wiki - a great reference once finished with the how_to’s (and for finding stuff that isn’t yet doucmented in them)
The following is a collection of Jon Nuggets™️
on parsing a custom text file instead of using something like json, found in "jai\modules\Text_File_Handler\examples\example.jai"
Here, we parse each line of the file. Many programmers in the modern day seem to be afraid
of parsing and fall back on huge libraries that don't even really solve the problem, and
end up giving them a bunch of extra work to do anyway, and that extra work may insidiously
worm its way throughout the program, increasing complexity of the program and reducing its
reliability. (See the typical large program that loads JSON files for an example of this).
In a modern programming language with powerful semantics and reasonable strings and good
compile-time and run-time checking, parsing simple things is pretty easy. It's much nicer
(and leads to more-solid programs) to do this than to try to load some generic uber-format
everywhere. Many people wearing Computer Science University hats will tell you this is
exactly backward, but they are exactly backward.
networking shit
high level overview - https://pvigier.github.io/2019/09/08/beginner-guide-game-networking.html
Don’t bang your head against a wall trying to get around NAT from scratch, instead bang your head against a wall while using the SteamAPI.
great resource for learning socket fundamentals from scratch - https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/
if you ever wanna go down the route of a netchad, here’s a lot more concepts - https://beej.us/guide/bgnet0/
multithreading
Introduction to Multithreading
Interlocked Operations
Memory barriers and semaphores
^ this was enough to get me going with multithreading
dump
most of this is unread and unsorted
todo: make a proper linked list
linked list stuff - https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/data-structures-and-invariants/
cycle detection - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Floyd's_tortoise_and_hare
animation stuff - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPoeNZZ6H4s
https://github.com/Angelo1211/HybridRenderingEngine#references
Parallel Computer Architecture and Programming
doom 2016 graphics study
https://gafferongames.com/post/networked_physics_2004/
https://gafferongames.com/post/udp_vs_tcp/
https://gafferongames.com/post/sending_and_receiving_packets/
https://gafferongames.com/post/virtual_connection_over_udp/
https://gafferongames.com/post/reliability_ordering_and_congestion_avoidance_over_udp/
https://gafferongames.com/post/what_every_programmer_needs_to_know_about_game_networking/
https://gafferongames.com/post/introduction_to_networked_physics/
https://gafferongames.com/post/deterministic_lockstep/
https://gafferongames.com/post/snapshot_interpolation/
https://gafferongames.com/post/snapshot_compression/
https://gafferongames.com/post/state_synchronization/
https://gafferongames.com/post/networked_physics_in_virtual_reality/
casey GJK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDS5gLSiLg0&t=2685s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qupqu1xe7Io