I/O in Plywood

C is a simple language. You’re only allowed to have one function with each name. C++, on the other hand, gives you much more flexibility: You can have multiple functions with the same name (overloading). You can overload built-in operators like + and ==. You can write function templates. Namespaces help you avoid naming conflicts. I like...

Flap Hero is a small game written entirely in C++ without using an existing game engine. All of its source code is available on GitHub. I think it can serve as an interesting resource for novice and intermediate game developers to study. In this post, I’ll explain how Flap Hero’s code is organized, how it differs from larger game projects, why it...

I just released a mobile game called Flap Hero. It’s a Flappy Bird clone with cartoony graphics and a couple of twists: You can go in the pipes (wow!) and it takes two collisions to end the game. Flap Hero is free, quick to download (between 3 - 5 MB) and opens instantly. Give it a try! Flap Hero is open source, too. Its source code is...

Consider the lowly text file. This text file can take on a surprising number of different formats. The text could be encoded as ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 (little or big-endian), Windows-1252, Shift JIS, or any of dozens of other encodings. The file may or may not begin with a byte order mark (BOM). Lines of text could be terminated with a linefeed...

For the past little while – OK, long while – I’ve been working on a custom game engine in C++. Today, I’m releasing part of that game engine as an open source framework. It’s called the Plywood framework. View the documentation View on GitHub Please note that Plywood, by itself, is not a game engine! It’s a framework for building all kinds of...