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This course is a gentle and comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of 2D game engine architecture. We'll discuss several of the most popular programming patterns used in game development and try to put all the theory we learn into context by coding a small 2D game engine using modern C++, SDL, and Lua.
We will write, together, a small ECS framework from scratch to manage our entities, components, and systems. We will discuss how engine programmers design their code and how we should think of organizing game objects in memory with performance in mind.
We'll try to write most of our engine code from scratch. All these libraries and tools are cross-platform, so you'll be able to code along with either Windows, macOS, or Linux!
The target audience for this course are beginner programmers that wish to learn more about how C++ works in the context of game development. Therefore, students must already know how to code and be familiar with basic concepts of programming and logic. You should be able to write if-else statements, loops, functions, and classes using simple OOP.
You do not need to know C++ before enrolling; many successful students have a background in web, mobile, and game development, working with languages like Java, Python, Ruby, Go, Swift, JavaScript, Ada, Zig, Kotlin, and many others.
This course is not just a simple tutorial on how to create a game with C++. This is the opportunity for you to think about the abstraction of what a "game" really is and all the pieces that need to interact to make them happen. More than that, this course allows you to write from scratch the code of a small C++ engine that can be used to create many types of games.
We will also touch other important topics like ECS, data-oriented design, STL containers, C++ templates, game loop, SDL rendering, event systems, asset management, memory management, and performance. And finally, we'll also learn how to embed the Lua language into our native C++ code to add scripting power to our engine.
While there are other resources about game engine development out there, they are either too theoretical or overwhelmingly long. If you are looking for a gentle introduction to the world of game engine programming and want to learn how games really work under the hood, then you should definitely take this course!
Gustavo Pezzi is a university lecturer in London, UK. He has won multiple education awards as a teacher and is also the founder of pikuma.com.
Gustavo teaches fundamentals of computer science and mathematics; his academic path includes institutions such as Pittsburg State University, City University of London, and University of Oxford.
73% of our students come back for another course
We don't offer discounts on our courses. Ever.
"Lucky me, I had a week off work and managed to fit this course into the 9 days off (2 weekends + 5 business days). It was full on to fit it in during that short period; you should expect to finish it far slower, especially if you do a lot of self-exploration during the course, but the knowledge has propelled me literally months ahead of where I would have been without it.
The code from the course is not production-ready, but I can now easily swap out sections with well-known industry open source projects with decades of contributors and actually understand what's happening in them.
I do recommend following the course as closely as possible; a lot of lectures later will fix simplistic design choices earlier. if you deviate from the course structure you will get into situations where you can't make these later changes."
"Great course!"
"Excellent coverage of all the fundamental topics of a 2D Game Engine! Gustavo covers on this course everything you need to know to understand how games like Mario Kart (SNES, GBA), Diablo (PC), and Pokémon (1st, 2nd and 3rd generations) worked under the hood. You can definitely leverage this knowledge to adapt the game engine built during the course to create basic versions of those awesome games."
"Excellent course! I really enjoyed this course! I've been working in the games industry for many years but never built an engine from scratch so it was interesting and useful to see some of the underlying concepts in a 2D engine. I learnt some new tricks, so thanks!"
