xianc78 @xianc78@gameliberty.club

So I started messing around with SDL and while I can't say if it's better or worse than SFML, I can say that it's pretty lower-level as expected. Of course being written in C means that functions require more parameters and you constantly need to convert string objects to c_strings (assuming you are using it with C++), but I knew that going in.

Back in my teenage years, I messed with Pygame a lot. Pygame is basically just a Python wrapper for SDL. I thought this would make learning SDL a breeze, but then I realized that Pygame is a lot more abstract as the creator thought that a simple SDL wrapper would be too much for Python programmers to handle.

I also realized that SDL is very bare-bones out of the box. You need extension libraries if you want to have music, the ability to load images other than bitmaps, or the ability to load TTF fonts. I find this weird because I thought SDL was more than just a graphics library so it should contain all those things.

Either way, I hope that SDL will cause less problems, especially when it comes to linking and porting. Hell, given that it is commonly used, I could probably get away with having my games dynamically linked and just assume that most people already have it installed.

Looking back on it, I should've included "No Demo" as an option. The only reason I didn't create a demo was that my game is FOSS therefore, freely redistributable, so I felt that including a demo was pointless even though it's a paid product.

I should have also put "You used AI" as an option because I did use AI and that makes me worthy of crucifixion in the eyes of many people, but I only used AI for backgrounds for the title screen and cutscenes, along with the prologue and epilogue text. I promise to only use AI sparingly and to prefer AI enhancement over AI generation, but I know that's not enough for the anti-AI freaks.

Why won't you buy my game?

Fun Fact: This was originally supposed to be the background image of the game over screen for my game, but I felt like I was going to violate some content guideline on itch.io for featuring something like this in what would otherwise be E-rated content.

It turns out releasing my first commercial game was more stressful than I thought. I only got three people to purchase it so far. I can't get a Windows build made yet. And the worst part is that I just realized that I dynamically compiled the game and the version of SFML I used is outdated and the most recent version breaks compatibility (though the version I'm using is the one that is found in the repositories on most Debian based distros so it shouldn't be a problem if you are using the noob distros).

I'm just going to switch to SDL for my next project. SFML has too many quirks and a much smaller community and documentation. SDL is the cross-platform DirectX, while SFML is just some guy saying "what if we do what SDL does and add unnecessary object-oriented quirks and exclude basic shit like depth-buffering". I do not recommend SFML. If you want an alternative to SDL, maybe try Allegro.

Though I am honestly sick of tool-hopping, but I realize that it's better to use what is tried and true than to be different for the sake of being different.

To the three people who have bought my game so far (yes really), have you played it yet?