XianForce's Blog

Important Links/References: PAlib, Elysian Shadows, LazyFoo, SDL, Moosader

The links I have posted above are things worth checking out =p.




Hey guys, I doubt any of you know, but I had another blog prior to this blog. Due to difficulties with Google accounts, it had to be deleted, and thus a new one made. I'm not going to go back and re-make all my posts, I think it will be better and easier if I just completely start anew and perhaps just bring up small details from previous posts.

Now that all that stuff is over and done with, let's get on to the real introduction.

I'm Skylar, and I'm a novice game programmer, and I have been programming for almost 2 years now. Up until this point, I haven't been real sure of what language/API I wanted to use, so I had a lot of mixed knowledge, and little to no experience. I finally got tired of it so I looked around, and decided to use C++ and SDL as my language and library, respectively.

This blog will detail the different challenges I come across, how I solve them, and it will also cover what progress is made. I hope to be able to post something relevant everyday, except for this week, because I'm on vacation and won't have internet for much longer.


At the creation of this blog, I have my first game with SDL finished: Tic Tac Toe, and I am working on my second game, Pong. I know these are beginning projects you generally see everywhere, but I'm trying to give my Pong clone some extra features that make it stand out from the rest.


Now I guess I'll talk a bit about my inspiration for getting into game development. As a kid, I always had the dreaming fantasies most of us have about making our own game. We get great ideas and we don't think much about how hard game development actually is. Well a few friends and I got a bit overambitious and detailed a large game out, I still can't even remember what genre of game it was. Well through a friend, I stumbled upon Game Maker and used that quite a bit at first, but I didn't like it so much, I used it for school projects to score some extra credit, but I hardly used it.

Then I bought a flashcart for DS. After searching through Youtube videos of how to set it up, I found a video about a DS homebrew project; Super Smash Bros DS. I watched the video, and even though it was only a simple demo, I was absolutely amazed. I thought, "I wish I could do something like that!" and through the comments box on that video, I found PAlib, a library for programming DS games. I found I would need to learn a programming language and I chose C. I then went through simple pieces of the library and had a lot of trial and error.

I didn't understand a lot of key features of the C language, things I would need to understand to get anywhere with game development. For example, the first game I made with it, was a copy of Bowman for the DS, it had no menu/title screen, and it only had birds that could be shot. The graphics sucked, everything was either a line or a ball, and the programming on it was just horrid. When I would clear the screens, instead of making a function to call the 6 functions to clear the backgrounds and sprites from both screens, then reinitialize text on both screens, I just called the 6 functions everytime the screens needed to be cleared.

After all that epic failure, I found another homebrew project that looked very interesting: Elysian Shadows. The project looked amazing, and they had a video series titled "The Adventures in Game Development." Falco (The leader of this team) also had some videos on how to get started on Game Development, I watched them and it completely changed my perspective on what I needed to do. He really laid it out. He didn't obscure anything, he told it like it was. So the next day I went out and bought a nice big book on C++, and after reading most of I started to learn the API, SDL. I found Lazy Foo's tutorials and I must say they are amazing.

So that's how I got started on game development, hope any reading this make the jump into it as well.