Thread: Need some help to get started with C game coding

What I'd like to accomplish is actually the very simplest form of it all. I just want to have an animated C program. I'd like to be the author of as much stuff as is possible, regardless of how stupid/pointless the interactive animation at the end might be.

The few things I want to stick to are:
C programming (This whole project is all about widening my knowledge of the C language)
Make use of a basic library which will allow me to render my animations.
Have some basic baby-steps of getting my first animated stuff showing and how to manipulate them.

Would appreciate any help/guidance available on acquiring the above.

You'll need to learn how to program with a GUI or such, like Windows API or a low-level graphics library such as Allegro or OpenGL.


It's the only way you can upload images and manipulate animations and such.

Unless you find some sort of file that can do the same as the above can, then you're good.

PS: I know some Windows API, so I can give advice.

...but ideally I wouldn't have to learn more library than C language and game-coding concepts.

Not possible. ANSI C/C++ does not have any native graphics support.

It depends a lot on the operating system you are using. As Bubba said, ANSI C is meant to be portable, so most of the graphics functions either need to be called using inline assembly like the stuff in Cprogramming.com - Tutorials: C++ Made Easy

That stuff won't work however in Windows protected-mode, so you have to use the Win32 GDI code, DirectX or OpenGL. There are many useful wrappers like SDL which will make your life easier. Imho, avoid GDI if possible since it's deprecated. Graphics in Windows are meant to be done using Direct2D starting with Windows 7 or an up-to-date Windows Vista.

I suggest you focus on making console applications that uses C functions since most of the graphics code will end up taking you away from C standard data types and basic functions like printf or cout. Think of console applications for batch processing stuff and you will have code that teaches you programming and can prove to be useful.