Welcome!Welcome to
Learning OpenGL through Fan Game Development! In this tutorial series, I intend to take you through the process of programming a complete computer game, from start to finish. Throughout this tutorial series, we will be developing a fan game, a popular project type for budding game developers due to their familiarity with the source game, an abundance of resources, instant product recognition (I say that in the term of the game itself – it is illegal in most countries to make any sort of profit from fan game development due to copyright law), and the level of enthusiasm developers possess for the game series (it takes a lot of love to deliver a video game from conceptualization to completion).
In this series, we are going to be developing a
Legend of Zelda fan game. Nintendo’s
Legend of Zelda video game series has been a major presence in the games industry, and is the series that originally got me interested in game development. More importantly, the series possesses traits that make it an excellent, complex, and rewarding target for fan game development – including complex dungeon puzzles, minor character customization (various items and equipment to solve numerous tasks, and a great chance for player creativity), intriguing story, and amazing boss fights.
Starting with establishing a project directory structure, obtaining and setting up our programming environment on Windows, Ubuntu Linux, and Mac OS X then laying the framework for our game, we will cover important cross-platform development techniques using C++, the OpenGL graphics library (please excuse the redundancy), and the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library that will provide us with a wonderful cross-platform development opportunity without introducing hundreds of megabytes’ worth of runtime dependencies and platform-specific code.
GitHub RepositoryTutorial Series IndexSeries DiscussionChapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Setting up your IDE