SDLTutorials.com offers a nice set of tutorials to get you started in game programming with the SDL library. SDL stands for “Simple DirectMedia Layer” and is a convenient layer between your application and audio, mouse, keyboard, joysticks and the screen. It also supports 3D via OpenGL.

And the good thing about SDL is that it is cross-platform: it works not only on Unix-based operating systems such as Linux and BSD flavors, but also on Windows, MacOS and MacOSX.

The first set of tutorials introduce the SDL video screen and the SDL events. You will also learn about the basic composition of a typical game, and how to deal with animations and object collisions. The second set of tutorials deal with separate subjects within SDL which may be useful in your projects. There is an SDL playground project using C++ on my GitHub which is based on these tutorials. Don’t forget to check out the branches. Feel free to fork from it!

I have different projects in mind with SDL, such as object detection from webcam streams, and an artificial world with artificial entities in a client/server architecture. And you, what would you make?