Tutorials

These lessons build up the SDK one piece at a time. Each one comes with a small, complete program in docs/examples that you can build and change. The last lesson puts everything together into a finished game.

#	Lesson	You'll learn	Example
1	The game loop	init, update and render; screen modes; drawing shapes; time	hello-world, shapes
2	Input	reading buttons, presses and releases; moving a player	input
3	Sprites and assets	packing images with assets.yml; drawing, animating and transforming sprites	sprites
4	Text	fonts, alignment, measuring and wrapping text	text
5	Sound	synth channels, envelopes, sound effects, music files	audio
6	Saving progress	read_save, write_save and on_quit	saves
7	Timers, tweens and particles	things that happen over time	timers-tweens, particles
8	Tile maps	building and scrolling a level	tilemap
9	Make a complete game	structuring a whole game	chili-catch

Building the examples

All the examples build together. From the SDK's folder:

cmake -B build.examples -S docs/examples
cmake --build build.examples
./build.examples/hello-world/hello-world

For the console, add the usual options and install the .blit files:

cmake -B build.examples-vgc -S docs/examples \
  -DPICO_SDK_PATH=../pico-sdk \
  -DPICO_BOARD=chilichip_vgc \
  -DPICO_PLATFORM=rp2350-arm-s \
  -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=$PWD/pico2.toolchain \
  -DBLIT_EXECUTABLE_PICO_BLIT=1
cmake --build build.examples-vgc

Then copy, for example, build.examples-vgc/chili-catch/chili-catch.blit onto the console's drive.

To start your own game from an example, copy its .cpp file over game.cpp in a project made from the template. The examples that use sprites need docs/examples/shared/sprites.png and an assets.yml entry for it, as shown in Sprites and assets.