Hello World!

If you’re here, you’re probably curious about game development (or wonderfully lost on the internet).

I’m an indie dev, building a game and its engine completely from scratch. On this site I’ll be sharing my journey and things I’ve learned.

My goal is simple: to inspire you, teach you a few things, and help you avoid some of the painful lessons I had to learn the hard way.

Who am I?

I’m a developer fully driven by passion, who fell in love with C (no joke) and low-level programming.

How I ended up there you may ask?

As far as I can remember I've always been fascinated by games, how they worked, how they were made, what was behind the scenes, etc...

At 12, after having played Jak and Daxter 3, I asked my mom to print me the documentation of Ogre3D, even though I didn't have a computer yet. When I started reading it, I was fascinated and overwhelmed at the same time. I remember about mipmapping, anti-aliasing, vectors, but the complexity of it scared me.

At 14, I finally got my first computer, a very bad laptop. So I installed and discovered Linux. That's when my journey began.

At 16, I studied IT and got my first taste of C++. I was so happy, but then the professor retired after a few months and programming was replaced by Cisco Certification Network Academy (I still ended up getting the certification, though.)

At 18, I started Analyst programmer studies, with Posix lessons. That’s where I discovered and fell in love with C and low-level programming. Unfortunately, those lessons lasted only a few weeks. The rest of the program was almost entirely Java and JavaScript (I’ll say it loud and proud: I don't like Java).

After finishing my studies, I drifted into corporate consulting jobs and got stuck there for years.

At 24, I founded my own consulting company. It was doing well, but I spent most of my time writing Javascript, growing increasingly frustrated that it felt limited to building websites. (shuuuush, Electron doesn’t count. We don’t talk about software obesity here.)

One evening, while riding my motorcycle home from work, I was T-boned by a car.

In that terrifying moment, my biggest fear wasn’t dying. It was the thought of dying without ever having built my own video game.

That accident became the wake-up call I needed. It completely changed my perspective.

During my recovery, I finally decided to stop delaying my lifelong dream. I spent months devouring technical books on C, game design, storytelling, architecture, and game engine development.

Why I’m creating my own game engine

Ever since I was 14, I’ve been obsessed with understanding how games are built. I’ve experimented with nearly every popular engine, framework, and library out there: Ogre, Unity, Unreal, Godot, SFML, XNA/MonoGame, Sokol, SDL, Allegro, Tigr, and many more.

Out of all of them, two stood out to me the most: SDL and Sokol.

Why SDL?

SDL is a mature, battle-tested, cross-platform multimedia library. It’s lower-level than most alternatives, which made it the perfect tool for truly understanding how everything works under the hood.

Why Sokol?

Sokol is a brilliant collection of single-header C libraries written by the incredibly talented hobbyist developer floooh. It’s minimalist, elegant, and joyfully readable. Every time I dig into the code, I’m amazed by how clean and clever it is.

That said, many people have told me it’s crazy to build a game (and its engine) from scratch instead of using an existing solution.

They’re probably right, it is crazy. But here’s the truth: for me, not doing it would feel even crazier.

I want to deeply understand the low-level side of game development, so I’ve chosen to build my own engine on top of SDL.

This blog is where I’ll document my journey.

A Word About Boxer (The Engine)

Boxer is the name of the 2D game engine I’m building from the ground up.

The name is inspired by the legendary “boxer” engine architecture found in cars like Subaru and Porsche.

A flat, horizontally opposed pistons design known for its efficiency, compact form, and low center of gravity. That’s exactly the philosophy I want for this engine: clean, simple, efficient, and lightweight, with as little overhead as possible.

Boxer will be written in pure C on top of SDL. It will be fully open source and free for anyone to use.

A Word About Knight Odyssey (The Game)

Knight Odyssey is the game I’m building with Boxer.

It’s a retro-style rogue-like heavily inspired by the 8-bit era. Think classic pixel art, tight gameplay, and that nostalgic feeling of old-school dungeon crawlers.

End

Check out my articles, I’ll take you down my rabbit hole...