SDL1 Game Tutorials

Note: These tutorials are for SDL1 and as a result are pretty out of date. It is strongly recommended that you use the SDL2 tutorials found here.

Overview

The aim of these tutorials is to show budding programmers how they can turn their creative desires into fully fledged games. The tutorials found here will cover a variety of topics and run through basics, intermediate, advanced, and theory based topics. If you have suggestions for other topics, please leave them in the form below.

Basic Series

The basic series of tutorials will start with a simple introduction to SDL and show you some of the most important features of the API, such as opening windows, loading and displaying images, playing sound effects, and handling input. It will conclude by showing you how to put together a simple game.

1.01 - Opening a window
1.02 - Graphics
1.03 - Sound
1.04 - Input and movement
1.05 - Simple shooter part #1
1.06 - Simple shooter part #2
1.07 - Simple shooter part #3
1.08 - Sprites and animation
1.09 - Starfields
1.10 - A basic game
1.11 - Joystick control
1.12 - Customizing controls

Intermediate Series

This series will demonstrate how to create a basic platform game, along with a map editor. It will show how to load data files, perform simple tasks like completing in objective before one can exit the level and introduce some basic enemies.

2.01 - Displaying a tile based map
2.02 - Scrolling a tile based map
2.03 - A tile based map editor
2.04 - Tile based map collision detection
2.05 - Advanced animation