Our 2D Game Engine Development Course Is Open to Everyone on BTK Akademi

Our founder Can Karabulut prepared a course for BTK Akademi on building a 2D game engine of your own. It is free, online and open at any time, so you can start today and learn at your own pace. More than 3,800 people have joined so far, and those who finish it earn a BTK Akademi certificate of participation.

See What Happens Inside an Engine

Unity, Unreal Engine and Cocos 2D do a lot of work out of sight. In this course you write that work yourself. You learn the game loop, delta time, how game objects are organised and architectural patterns such as ECS (Entity Component System), then you render graphics with C++ and SDL and manage scenes and the camera. Animation, collision, an event system, input and output, logging and debugging follow as subsystems of your engine.

From an Empty Window to Your First Game

The course has 15 sections and about nine hours of video. You set up Visual Studio 2022 with C++23, SDL2, GLM, Dear ImGui and OpenGL, open the game window and draw your first objects with SDL. Game time, player controls and animations, physics engines, layering, asset management, TrueType fonts and sound come next. In section 14 you make your first game with the engine you wrote, and the last section designs an editor for it with Dear ImGui.

Before You Start

You need to know C++. On the mathematics side the course uses trigonometry, vectors, first and second degree equations and their graphs, two dimensional spirals and curves, and matrices. Some game development experience and a computer with a dedicated graphics card (GPU) are also needed. The lessons are in Turkish, with Turkish subtitles, and according to BTK Akademi most people finish the course in about two weeks.

How to Join

Sign in on BTK Akademi and start the course whenever you like. The full curriculum is on our course page.