SDL Game Tutorials

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.

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.

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.

Tim
July 21st, 2009 at 20:52

Can you add multi-layers to the Tiled Based Map Editor tutorial? I've been trying to do it with multi-dimensional arrays by adding an extra dimension in the map structure member : int tile[LAYER][MAX_MAP_Y][MAX_MAP_X]. So far I can't seem to get it to work where you just work on the map editor and I have it able to switch to the different layers with the press of the c key on the keyboard. The problem I'm having is when I change layers the previous map window disappears and the new map window for next layer comes up. In that current window I can't see the previous stuff that was drawn in layer 0 if I'm in the next layer up like say 1. Currently I have 3 layers going but it seem that I can only draw to each individual layer. I want it to be where I'm only working on one map layer but when I want the tile image to be on another layer of the same map it can draw itself(the tile image) to the current map layer. This is to have effects such as tree on fire if my base layer 0( the map I'm currently working with) is filled with a tree. My next image fire should be on layer 1 so that it sits on top of layer 0 where the tree was. This way I don't have to make a new image tile with tree and fire. I would just use the current image tiles of a tree and a fire. Please direct me in the right direction on how to implement that with what you have for the Tile Based Map Editor. I'm very thankful you have this map editor up and I'm learning a great bit and want to add functionality to it. Thanks