Last Stop

If you ever wanted to program your own video game, this is a good place to start. I remember when I started learning programming it was surprisingly difficult to find out how to make an honest and simple game. In fact, after reading most programming books, the only type of game you could make would be a Zork clone.

You are in a dank cave and you can see nothing, but you hear a walrus in the distance.

What do you do?

1. Look for the walrus.
2. Watch The Big Lebowski
3. Decide that the walrus is Paul.

This is not to knock Zork in any way! Zork is a clever, well written, and extremely well thought out game (even if my pseudo-quote isn’t). But in a world where we’re spoiled by moving objects, you want to know how to move and interact with something on screen. The problem is it takes a lot of different knowledge sets to get the job done. But in this post, you’ll get started learning how to make your very own Pong clone.

A Few Notes..

First, a few notes about setting up. I’m writing this tutorial from the Mac OS X perspective. However, everything we are about to code is, essentially, cross-platform. This is because, it is written using plaing old C, OpenGL, and GLUT. All of these things are themselves cross-platform, and therefore, can be compiled anywhere you have a C compiler (OpenGL and GLUT are just C libraries).

Setting up your environment

Mac OS X

For some reason, this always seems to be the hardest part whenever learning something new in programming. Fortunately, I found a great blog post that makes setting up XCode for compiling an app using OpenGL and GLUT very easy. Read all about setting up your XCode.

Windows

The process in Windows is actually a bit easier (gasp!) than in Mac OS X and there’s plenty of resources available on Google for getting setup. Here’s one in particular.

Linux

Here’s something unusual, you guys get a video.

Congratulations, the hardest part is done! In my next blog post. We’ll start to get knee deep in game programming concepts.

Update!

Part II is Up!

Tags: c, game, glut, linux, mac, opengl, os x, pong, programming, Windows

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.