I'm interested in learning how to program Retro / Top Down style RPG games. Games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past or Star Dew Valley.
I would like to program such games without using an engine, but only with SDL2 and OpenGL.
Can anyone share any recommendations, please? I'd be interested in any books, tutorials, courses, or people that write about such things.
Thank you in advance!
https://learnopengl.com/ is the usual go-to resource for OpenGL things. You’ll probably want to brush up on your matrix and vector maths if it’s been time since you worked with them, too. 2-D games are usually not too heavy on the mathematics; It depends on the game, of course (mostly comes down to how advanced you want your physics to be).
For a 2-D game, you’re going to want some sort of batch renderer system (combining all the quads into a single mesh to avoid too many draw calls). This playlist by TheCherno covers it quite well, though make sure you don’t just blindly follow the videos.
Probably not relevant to a top-down game (again, depends), but these posts (though old) have pretty good explanations of 2-D physics in games.
Also, is there a specific reason why you don’t want to use SDL’s built-in renderer? I’m all for DIY’ing this sort of thing, but OpenGL can be difficult if you’re a beginner. What language are you planning to use?
Feel free to post here should you have any questions; I would happily answer them.
Edit: spelling.
Thank you for the detailed response!
I will be sure to check out all of those resources.
> Also, is there a specific reason why you don’t want to use SDL’s built-in renderer?
Not at all. Is that an alternative to OpenGL? I'm quite new to this, and I had just assumed OpenGL would be the thing to use for a game like this. I would prefer to do everything with SDL2. As you pointed out, I think that would make it easier on me as a beginner.
> What language are you planning to use?
I will be using Odin (https://odin-lang.org/). I have found it easy to follow any SDL2 tutorials that use C.
Nice! Odin looks cool.
Is that an alternative to OpenGL?
Not really. OpenGL is a graphics API, for more or less giving flat instructions to the graphics card. SDL, however, includes a 2-D renderer out of the box which is very easy to use: You can load in a bitmap, send it to a texture and then draw it to the screen. I don’t know if the Odin binding of SDL binds the renderer API, but chances are it does. Here’s an example of drawing a picture with SDL’s renderer.
> Nice! Odin looks cool.
Definitely. I'm really enjoying it.
> I don’t know if the Odin binding of SDL binds the renderer API, but chances are it does. Here’s an example of drawing a picture with SDL’s renderer.
Yup! It sure does.
> OpenGL is a graphics API, for more or less giving flat instructions to the graphics card. SDL, however, includes a 2-D renderer out of the box which is very easy to use.
Ok, cool. I'll leave OpenGL for later. Odin has bindings for that, as well, when the time comes.
