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Background Andre Weissflog wrote an article in 2018 called “Handles are the better pointers”. In it he talks about how one can use handles instead of pointers when one wants to store permanent references to elements in an array. I think there are many nuances regarding handles that only become apparent after some real-world usage. Here we’ll look at an implementation in Odin and discuss it. I use the Odin Programming Language and the examples are game development-centric....

In this post I’ll share some details on how I wrote the first book about the Odin Programming Language. I’ll talk about how I got started, what the process was like, as well as some technical things related to writing programming books. The book is called “Understanding the Odin Programming” language. It’s a digital book (HTML and EPUB). It was released on December 6, 2024. The book is available at https://odinbook....

If you are a game developer then you might have heard about data-oriented design. You might have read that programming in a data-oriented way can make your game run faster. However, if you come from some object oriented approach then the ideas you’ve seen can feel a bit overwhelming. It may seem like you need to completely redo all your gameplay code. Where do you even start? So let’s try to keep it simple....

Preface NOTE: I have created a whole book, loosely based on this article! You can read more about it at odinbook.com. For comparison: This article contains 12400 words, the book contains 76000 words. This article is an introduction to the Odin Programming Language. It is aimed at people who know a bit of programming, but have never touched Odin. It is not a reference guide, rather I try to keep things informal and talk about what I think are important aspects of the language....

Since I was 19 I’ve wanted to make my own video games, as in creating everything in the game myself, often referred to as being a solo developer, or solodev. But I was bad at committing to anything and I always thought that I lacked some specific skill such as music making, game design skills and art skills. Now I’m 35 and just released my own game (see trailer below). I’ve made everything in it myself....

Today we will make our game look less dull by adding a run animation to the player character. We will download an image containing an animation, draw it in game and then make the animation play properly. A theme throughout today’s post is that we will try the different procs for drawing graphics on the screen that Raylib provides, and see how they can be used in different circumstances. A new thing in this post is that each section ends with a “Full code + what changed in this section” expandable item....

In this second post about making games using Odin and Raylib we shall look at how to add a simple player character and make it moveable. We will first introduce some simple left to right movement, and after that add gravity and the ability to jump. Here’s the companion video for this post. If you get confused by this post, then chances are that the companion video can help you understand:...

Hello and welcome to the first post in this blog series on making games using Odin and Raylib. Throughout this series we will create a small 2D game with simple platforming mechanics. When we are done you’ll be able to extend the game, or take the knowledge you’ve learnt and make other, more complex games! This series is aimed at people with little to no programming experience. Being a bit technical and having an interest in games will help....

This post is about what hot reload for gameplay code is, why you would use it and what the limitations are. I’ll also present an example implementation in Odin Programming Language. The final section is on some caveats, improvements and how to use hot reload in Odin together with Raylib. The front parts are language agnostic while the further down you read the more Odin specific it gets. The methods I will outline here are for people who are writing their own game ‘from scratch’, meaning you don’t use any game engine....