Gfx library?

Peter

Sorry for the noob question, but I really am still a game dev newbie:

I want to write a program with has a graphical 2D top-down map and some "icons" to click on.
Which gfx and GUI lib do you recommend? Ideally easy to program? Doesn't need to be fast.

I'm using C. All I've tried so far have their complicatedness and somehow don't work for me: Raylib, Gtk, SDL, OpenGL.

Edit: Here some details that trouble me:

All libs except Raylib have incompatible versions.
Raylib doesn't show what I paint. even when I use BeginDrawing() and EndDrawing().

Edit 2: Now I'm trying SFML. Seems promising, though it has incompatible versions, too.

ffaf

Thanks for the edit, I will check it out too!

mdtrooper

There is a task in Godot to made the engine as shared library...but it needs a lot of work to be stable.

Peter

mdtrooper Godot as a lib, that would be great for me. :)

Modanung

I'd also recommend SFML in your case, or SDL. GUI libraries exist for each of them. And you have reason to consider Godot, you may want to have a look at Dry as well. It is a bit more lightweight, while still being a full engine.

In case you're unfamiliar with Tiled, it also deserves a mention as potential level editor, even if your game will not be tile-based. As long as your project is 2D, it will probably cover anything imaginable better than any engine-provided editor and the range of existing parsers is somewhat mind-boggling.
That list might also be a good source for finding the most suitable engine.

Peter

Dry is C++ which I avoid as hell (which is unprofessional, but I'm not in the game industry so I can be unprofessional if I want to.)
Thanks for mentioning Tiled and its parsers. I will have a close look at it. Yes, my game will be 2D based, so I guess using a tile-based editor makes perfect sense.

I guess after years of unproductivity this time the game development is more succesfull because I want to play the game myself. "Scratching an itch" sort of.

Modanung

Peter Dry is C++ which I avoid as hell

Making games without classes sounds like torture, libraries protect you from using the lower level stuff directly, and nobody is forcing you to write templates. I think avoiding it is not so much unprofessional, but rather something of an unfounded irrational fear. You're already writing C.

SFML is - although it provides C bindings - also written in C++. Might be a good opportunity to dip your toes. The water is fine. 🙂

Peter

Well, I tried C++. I hate it. And to me it is quite different from C. And you can write OOP in C.

I love low level stuff. And I can't get used to libs which make the API more complicated than the low level stuff. Also I permanently get something broken in libs.

Peter

Update: With difficulties I managed to start my game dev with Raylib. No screenshot yet because it is very early in development, nothing to see. (Modanung was right about using a lib instead of doing it all from scratch.)