SFMLvania

Historical Context

January 2021 during part of winter break and last semester of high school. I had some free time on my hands and after almost a full year of making terminal games, I had discovered and begun making the plunge into 2d graphics applications with SFML. Having a shiny new piece of tech, I wanted to try out all its features

Technologies

C++ SFML (for the first time)

Challenges

Learning how to use a new library and use 2d graphics for the first time, game state machines, resource managers, how to save/load level data, making a level/tile editor, platformer physics, collision detection, collision response, making tooling for a game, gosh darn memory management and memory leaks

Achievements

Easy to use fun little platformer game level builder with a basic platformer game underlying it https://youtu.be/vj4saqWmfjc

The Story

I was having a grand old time making games in the terminal but wished I could use the mouse for my games and realized that that meant the jump to non-ASCII graphics. SFMLvania is one of my first SFML projects. With it, I was inspired to create a clone of the classic NES title Castlevania by Konami but ended up creating a fun little level platform editor game. It wasn't anywhere near faithful to what I had set out to do because I lacked the knowledge of how to implement actual game mechanics like combat and good platformer physics. Regardless, I was very happy with how this project turned out as it took my C++ to a new level.