Up to this point we have been laying the foundation for developing a game. So far we’ve setup a basic structure to handle common routines, we’ve setup a special class to handle events, and we’ve also setup a class to handle a few surface functions. In this tutorial we’ll take all those things, combine them, and create a tic-tac-toe game. Don’t worry, things should be pretty simple. Use the last tutorial to build off of.

The first thing we are going to need to do is plan our game. From experience, we know that tic-tac-toe has a 3×3 grid, where you place X’s and O’s. So, we know that we will need 3 graphics, one for the grid, one for the X, and one for the O. We don’t need multiples of the X or O, because we can draw them in the program as many times as we like. Lets eliminate this first step. Our grid is going to be 600×600, and our X’s and O’s will be 200×200 (1/3 of the area).

» Read more: SDL Tutorial – Tic Tac Toe

Alongside the basics of game development is something called Events. All videogames, from basic free poker applications to the highly complex PC games and console titles, use events to interact with the player. These events can come from keyboards, mice, joysticks, gamepads, and so on, or events from our operating system. It’s important to understand how events work if we are to appropriately interact a user with a game. We’ve already been using events, but only for closing our window, now we’ll look at how to receive events from the user. » Read more: SDL Events

These tutorials are meant to teach someone with some experience using C++, or perhaps another programming language. If you have a hard time following certain ideas related to the code itself and not conceptual ideas (those relating to games), then I urge you to first read our tutorials that explain the C++ programming language. It’s not vital to understand everything about C++, but every little bit will help later on.

In these tutorials we will be referncing to CodeBlocks as our IDE of choice, with gcc and mingw for compilation. If you wish to use another IDE and compiler that is up to you, but it may be harder to follow along if you have limited experience with linking libraries. If you wish to download CodeBlocks, you can do so for free at http://www.codeblocks.org (download the one including the mingw package). We recommend you use the stable version, unless you want to spend the extra time and use the nightly builds.

» Read more: SDL Tutorial Basics