Daniele Penazzo (Penaz) - 2D Game Development: From Zero To Hero

Daniele Penazzo

Copyright 2019-2022 Daniele Penazzo

2D Game Development: From Zero To Hero ( C++ edition, version 0.7.2-r2-1-g55313b7 ) is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 license.

If you want to view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or check the LICENSE file in the book repository.

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The PDF and EPub releases of this book can be found at the following address:

• https://therealpenaz91.itch.io/2dgd-f0th (Official Itch.io Page)

This books source code can be found in the following official repositories:

• https://gitlab.com/Penaz/2dgd_f0th (Official GitLab Repository)
• https://github.com/Penaz91/2DGD_F0TH/ (Official GitHub Repository)

This work shall be attributed to Daniele Penazzo and the 2D Game Development: From Zero To Hero community, to see a full list of the contributors, please check the CONTRIBUTORS file in the repository, or head to the contributors section in this book.

Welcome to the book! This book aims to be an organized collection of the communitys knowledge on game development techniques, algorithms and experience with the objective of being as comprehensive as possible.

Its really common in todays game development scene to approach game development through tools that abstract and guide our efforts, without exposing us to the nitty-gritty details of how things work on low-level and speeding up and easing our development process. This approach is great when things work well, but it can be seriously detrimental when we are facing against issues: we are tied to what the library/framework creators decided was the best (read applicable in the widest range of problems) approach to solving a problem.

Games normally run at 30fps, more modern games run at 60fps, some even more, leaving us with between 33ms to 16ms or less to process a frame, which includes:

• Process the user input;
• Update the player movement according to the input;
• Update the state of any AI that is used in the level;
• Move the NPCs according to their AI;
• Identify Collisions between all game objects;
• React to said Collisions;
• Update the Camera (if present);
• Update the HUD (if present);
• Draw the scene to the screen.

These are only some basic things that can be subject to change in a game, every single frame.

When things dont go well, the game lags, slows down or even locks up. In that case we will be forced to take the matter in our hands and get dirty handling things exactly as we want them (instead of trying to solve a generic problem).

When you are coding a game for any device that doesnt really have infinite memory, like a mobile phone, consoles or older computers, this technical low-level know-how becomes all the more important.

This book wants to open the box that contains everything related to 2D game development, plus some small tips and tricks to make your game more enjoyable. This way, if your game encounters some issues, you wont fear diving into low-level details and fix it yourself.

Or why not, make everything from scratch using some pure-multimedia interfaces (like SDL or SFML) instead of fully fledged game engines (like Unity).

This book aims to be a free (as in price) teaching and reference resource for anyone who wants to learn 2D game development, including the nitty-gritty details.

Enjoy!

When talking about logic theory, the variables will be represented with a single uppercase letter, written in math mode:

The following symbol will be used to represent a logical AND:

The following symbol will be used to represent a logical OR:

The logical negation of a variable will be represented with a straight line on top of the variable, so the negation of the variable will be