Welcome to the section on Raylib. Raylib is a library to make it easy to develop games and other programs the draw on the screen. It is developed in C, but we can also use it from Odin.
One great thing is the Raylib support comes with Odin itself. It is part of the “vendor” library collection. That means you don’t need to install anything apart from Odin to start writing Raylib code.
Instead of reading the articles in this series in order, you might want to jump around a bit, based on what interests you at any point in time. Of course, there is nothing that prevents you from reading in the intended order.
You are not expected to have read through all the articles on Odin before starting here either. You may find yourself jumping a bit between lesson sets, and that is completely fine. It was writing games and demos that inspired me to start learning programming. If I had spent my young years only writing programs that print messages to a terminal, I’d probably have stopped programming a long time ago.
I suggest you create a directory to experiment in. Any time you have an idea, try it out! It doesn’t matter how small or silly it is. Graphics programming is fun, period. Don’t ever hesitate to experiment here. The more you write code, the better you become.
If you need inspiration, I suggest you look around for demo scene productions from the 80s and 90s. I was a Commodore use back in those days, so I have a fairly large collection of Commodore 64 and Amiga demos.
Type “Amiga demo” or “c64” in the YouTube search bar, for instance. Hopefully, you will feel inspired to write your own productions, not by using some software, but by figuring out the math behind it and writing code.
Of course, the C64 and the Amiga are limited by today’s standards. I spent countless hours looking at demos and trying to replicate what I saw.
There’s going to be quite a bit of math in the following articles. That scares some, but there really is no need. I’m by no means very good at math. In fact, I was terrible at math until I realized there was a connection between graphic effects and math. From that moment on, I fell in love with math.
If you do find the math difficult, I’ll do my best to explain it, at least in the beginning, as well as give you exercises to help you unlock that math capability we all have. Eventually, you’ll just naturally begin to get a feeling for how it works. Again, remember to experiment as much as possible.
That being said, let’s start writing some code, shall we?