Chapter 1. It's Alive! It's Alive! – Setup and First Program

The proud feeling of building something is a powerful one. Coupled with the thrill of exploration, it hardly makes it difficult to narrow down why most of our fellow game developers do what they do. Although creation is a major force in this process, failure governs it, much like any other subject. Sooner or later, all of us will be placed in a situation where a brick wall not only derails the development of a given project, but maybe even kills the motivation to work on it. Having a good resource to fall back on is crucial during those times, especially for new developers who are just now getting their hands dirty, and that's where we come in. Our goal is to pass on the experience in the most hands-on approach by developing real projects during the course of this book.

In this chapter, we're going to be covering:

• Setting up SFML on your machine and IDE
• Flow of an average SFML application
• Opening and managing windows
• Basics of rendering

The purpose of this chapter is to ease you into the process of developing games using Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML). Let's get started by first tackling the setup process!