Beginning Game Programming v3.0

Last Updated: Nov 26th, 2024

Hey, you're not supposed to be here 😉.

Anyway, you are currently looking at the pre-alpha version of the SDL3 tutorials. This page will become fully public once SDL3 has its first official stable release. For now, updates will be paused until SDL3 has its first official release. If you want more SDL3 code to play around with, check out the SDL3 ports at the bottom of each page of the SDL2 tutorials provided by the creator of SDL Sam Lantinga.

Since SDL3 is not officially released yet, there are changes being made to the final API and that might cause tutorial code to break. Here are the current sha values of the git commits I am using:

SDL3 - bbc9c75618fbc60583123e03f31f4e856f2654bf
SDL3_image - 0d418a2a2dc562699854d9c2fc264304ec404e2c
SDL3_ttf - 582c6957161d6cc4d3b09cae37744bdfe3700368
SDL3_mixer - 3a272cdbac0eac4be5cbe3da2ed2a4d3afefcf19

These tutorials were designed for beginner C++ programmers (with some stuff thrown in for the more experienced) who want to move from text based applications to real time games with graphics. By the end of these tutorials, you'll know the basics so you can really start digging into lower level game programming.

Table of Contents
Introduction	A little intro before we start coding.
Hello SDL3	Get started making games with your first SDL3 App.
Textures and Extension Libraries	Load PNGs and render textures.
Key Presses and Key States	Learn how to handle keyboard input.
Color Keying	Give your textures transparent backgrounds.
Sprite Clipping and Stretching	Clip sprites from a sprite sheet and resize them.
Rotation and Flipping	Learn to rotate and flip your images.
Color Modulation and Alpha Blending	Modify your texture colors and make your images transparent with alpha blending.
True Type Fonts	Render True Type fonts with SDL_ttf.
Mouse Events	Learn how to handle mouse input.
Timing	Learn the basics of application time.
Advanced Timers	Make a timer that can start/stop/pause/unpause.
Frame Rate and VSync	Learn how to manage frame rate.
Motion	Learn how to manage frame rate.
Animation	Learn to animate a sprite.
Sound Effects and Music	Play music and sound effects with SDL_mixer.
Collision Detection	Learn how to check collision between collision boxes.
Text Input and Clipboard Handling	Input strings and handle copying and pasting.
Scrolling	Draw levels larger than the screen with a scrolling camera.
State Machines	Manage your game states with state machines.

If you find any bugs or typos in the tutorials please ~~contact me~~ wait until SDL3 is officially released because upstream code is going to be buggier than officially released code.