https://ncot.uk/tags/game-development/ Recent content in Game Development on NCoT Tech Hugo en-gb Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:06:31 +0100 https://ncot.uk/videos/retro-gamedev-is-hard/ Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:36:56 +0000 https://ncot.uk/videos/retro-gamedev-is-hard/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I create a tilemap system. #AgonLight #Sprites #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/videos/game-engine-to-functional-first-game---the-hello-world-of-gamedev/ Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:36:10 +0000 https://ncot.uk/videos/game-engine-to-functional-first-game---the-hello-world-of-gamedev/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I actually make a game! For once I actually finish something. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/videos/agon-light-joystick-interface---how-not-to-program-hardware/ Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:28:30 +0000 https://ncot.uk/videos/agon-light-joystick-interface---how-not-to-program-hardware/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I make a joystick work by building a joystick interface for the Agon Light. Then I program it to add it to my game. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/ecs-archetypes-system/ Sat, 29 Nov 2025 22:57:45 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/ecs-archetypes-system/ I’m creating a game engine from scratch. Last time I wrote about the entity component system and how that works. This time I want to explain how the entities get created. #GameDev https://ncot.uk/videos/axis-aligned-bounding-boxes---collision-detection-without-physics/ Tue, 04 Nov 2025 21:19:21 +0000 https://ncot.uk/videos/axis-aligned-bounding-boxes---collision-detection-without-physics/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I get thoroughly distracted and accidentally make a Pong style game idea while figuring out how to add collision detection to my game engine. I implement the AABB Axis Aligned Bounding Box algorithm. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/videos/creating-an-entity-component-system-for-my-retro-video-game-engine/ Tue, 14 Oct 2025 09:43:51 +0100 https://ncot.uk/videos/creating-an-entity-component-system-for-my-retro-video-game-engine/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at programming a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I throw away a ton of code and replace it with a shiny new Entity Component System. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/ecs-entity-component-system/ Fri, 03 Oct 2025 22:05:17 +0100 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/ecs-entity-component-system/ Let’s make a game engine properly, rather than beating on it until something works. This time, I’m creating an entity component system. #GameDev https://ncot.uk/videos/state-machines---how-to-engineer-better-software/ Fri, 03 Oct 2025 20:19:23 +0100 https://ncot.uk/videos/state-machines---how-to-engineer-better-software/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way, my attempt at writing a game from scratch for the Agon Light, using nothing but C. This time I attempt to put the “engineering” back in “software engineer”. Instead of blindly hacking away at my code and hoping for the best, I am now more thoughtfully designing a system. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/videos/a-retro-game-made-with-21st-century-thinking---gamedev-the-hard-way/ Wed, 11 Jun 2025 22:05:03 +0100 https://ncot.uk/videos/a-retro-game-made-with-21st-century-thinking---gamedev-the-hard-way/ In this abridged video, I walk you through the process of building a text adventure game from scratch on the Agon Light. Rather than a deep dive into every line of code, this video focuses on explaining the overall structure and design choices behind the project. #AgonLight #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/videos/my-game-engine-has-a-fatal-flaw--heres-how-i-found-it-gamedev-the-hard-way/ Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:10:43 +0100 https://ncot.uk/videos/my-game-engine-has-a-fatal-flaw--heres-how-i-found-it-gamedev-the-hard-way/ Welcome to the next edition of Gamedev The Hard Way. This time I’m programming some basic enemy behaviours to test out my game’s entity handling code. Things don’t go to plan however and I discover some quite major problems with the physics and tilemap code. #Sprites #GameDev #Graphics #Programming https://ncot.uk/videos/tilemap-game-engine-development-agon-light-c-programming/ Thu, 24 Oct 2024 14:32:42 +0000 https://ncot.uk/videos/tilemap-game-engine-development-agon-light-c-programming/ In this video, I’ll show you how I built a tilemap system from scratch in C for the Agon Light, and integrated it into my existing game engine. Getting the physics engine to handle collisions with the tilemap was no easy task, but I’ll walk you through how I made it work. On top of that, I explore some game design, sketching out ideas for where the game is… #AgonLight #CProgramming #Sprites #GameDev https://ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-game-the-hard-way-from-scratch-using-c-part-2/ Sat, 07 Sep 2024 18:54:09 +0000 https://ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-game-the-hard-way-from-scratch-using-c-part-2/ Join me on a journey as I attempt to write a game for my Agon Light using nothing but raw C programming. In this second episode I figure out how to make a very basic 2D rigid body physics system work. #AgonLight #CProgramming #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-game-the-hard-way-from-scratch-using-c-part-1/ Sat, 17 Aug 2024 18:00:00 +0000 https://ncot.uk/videos/writing-a-game-the-hard-way-from-scratch-using-c-part-1/ Join me on a journey as I attempt to write a game for my Agon Light using nothing but raw C programming. In this first episode I figure out what kind of game to make, look at some shareware games of the past and get a basic game engine working, using nothing but C code – no external game engines or modern development tools. #AgonLight #AtariST #ZXSpectrum #CProgramming https://ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/gamedev-the-hard-way-doing-it-all-myself/ Wed, 26 Jun 2024 09:39:40 +0000 https://ncot.uk/projects/agon-light/gamedev-the-hard-way-doing-it-all-myself/ Writing games is hard enough by itself, requiring a lot of different skills. So how can I make this even harder? How about I do literally everything myself, starting with nothing but a blank source file and write all the code by hand. No game engines or libraries. If I need something, I need to write it myself. And since we’re doing this the hard way, let’s write games for an… #AgonLight #Z80 #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/gamedev-music-art-and-being-creative/ Sat, 25 Mar 2023 23:52:10 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/gamedev-music-art-and-being-creative/ I am not a creative person, and I’d quite like to change this. There’s a bunch of creative skills I’ve never put the effort into improving and I think I might have some ways to overcome this. Let’s have a look… #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/setting-up-msys2-and-libsdl2-for-graphics-programming-in-windows/ Thu, 17 Nov 2022 22:14:42 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/setting-up-msys2-and-libsdl2-for-graphics-programming-in-windows/ I’m starting a graphics based project, and decided to use SDL2 in Windows. This meant setting up a development environment. Here’s some notes on how I set up MSYS2, VS Code and LibSDL2. #CProgramming #SDL2 #Windows #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/document-your-internal-projects/ Sat, 27 Aug 2022 13:09:37 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/document-your-internal-projects/ I have aspirations of actually making a game for my Spectrum Next. It’d be nice to turn the learning I’ve done into something more than a bunch of videos. This is not a blog post about making a game, this is a blog post about keeping notes. A few months ago I created a pretty nice template for a Spectrum Next game. It had a little state machine for different screens, an input handler and some… #SpectrumNext #RetroComputing #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/githubgameoff-jam-2019-day-1/ Sat, 02 Nov 2019 22:44:58 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/githubgameoff-jam-2019-day-1/ Day 1 of the GitHub Game Off jam, where I create a basic platform controller and level builder. #Godot #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/one-lone-coder-jam-2019/ Sun, 08 Sep 2019 18:50:23 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/one-lone-coder-jam-2019/ This week I took part in the One Lone Coder 2019 game jam. The theme of this was “destruction”… My entry was started Friday, a mere 48 hours before the deadline. Yes, a week long jam where I had a whole seven days to come up with an idea was started 48h before the end… Have a good idea The main issue I had this time was thinking up an idea that felt good enough to be a game. I had a bunch of half-ideas, but none of them… #Godot #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/godot-wild-jam-12/ Tue, 20 Aug 2019 09:44:59 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/godot-wild-jam-12/ Between the 9th and 16th August 2019 I took part in the Godot Wild Jam. Let’s go through what it was like, and the things I learned this time. #Godot #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/component-based-game-engine-from-scratch-part-2/ Sat, 13 Apr 2019 16:50:49 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/component-based-game-engine-from-scratch-part-2/ Last time I explained in detail how the whole system worked. This time I will focus on the component system, as it is quite complex. Using it isn’t complex, but I’m trying to mimic Unity’s functionality that was written in C#. Functionality that is partially implemented within the editor and doesn’t relate directly to typing in code. I have no idea how Unity really does… #CPlusPlus #CProgramming #GameDev #Programming https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/easier-game-controller-input-in-sdl-with-sdl_gamecontroller/ Sat, 13 Apr 2019 14:35:10 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/easier-game-controller-input-in-sdl-with-sdl_gamecontroller/ Game controllers on computers are somewhat irritating to manage compared to a console. Has the user plugged in an XBox controller? A PS4 controller, or have they obtained some random USB controller they found on eBay? Coping with this in SDL was difficult, with SDL just telling you “button 13 pressed” or “joystick axis 4 moved”, which is great except all your code really wants to know is… #SDL2 #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/component-based-game-engine-from-scratch-part-1/ Sun, 10 Mar 2019 21:44:59 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/component-based-game-engine-from-scratch-part-1/ This is going to be the first part in a continuing series where I try to explain how and why I’m creating my own game engine using C++ and the SDL library. My engine isn’t going to do anything amazing, but will borrow ideas from other engines I’ve used before such as Unity. #CPlusPlus #CProgramming #SDL2 #GameDev https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/text-printing-using-bitmap-characters-in-c-and-sdl/ Mon, 04 Feb 2019 22:13:22 +0000 https://ncot.uk/blog-posts/text-printing-using-bitmap-characters-in-c-and-sdl/ Back in the mists of history, sometime around the 90s it was quite common for games and demos to display text on the screen. Since we’re talking about old computers with barely any usable RAM, the text was stored as images. A giant single image with every character placed within it. To display words programmers had to be a bit inventive. That’s the topic of today’s post. #CPlusPlus #SDL2 #GameDev #Graphics