Introduction

Welcome to The Manatee Game Engine, a book about building games using Manatee. The Manatee Game Engine is a set of tools to help you build amazing, optimized, and performant video games, without sacrificing developer experience. Manatee is built using the Zig programming language, making it a perfect fit for either starting a brand new project or leveling up an existing C/C++ game.

Who Manatee is For

Right now Manatee is built just for myself (James Kienle), however in the future I'm hoping that Manatee will be usable for many more. My dream is that Manatee will one day be used by

  • Game Design and Computer Science Students
  • Indie Developers / Hackers
  • Artists with Amazing Ideas
  • Game Studios from Indie to AAA

Who This Book is For

This book assumes two things

  1. You have a moderate understanding of how to use a computer (managing your files, installing software, running basic commands, etc.)
  2. You've played video games before and want to build one

This book assumes no prior programming or game design knowledge (however it's super helpful to have) and is meant to be as broadly accessible as possible to a wide variety of backgrounds. I had no knowledge of game design before building Manatee, and I believe that if I could build this, than anyone should be able to use it!

With all of that being said, it would be incredibly helpful to learn a few things before going too deep with learning Manatee. These things include:

  1. Git. FreeCodeCamp has an amazing tutorial for beginners.
  2. Zig. Zig is the programming language that Manatee is written in, and you'll need to learn it in order to build games with Manatee. Unfortunately Zig's documentation is lacking in places, but this book tries to compensate for that where it can. The Zig Guide can be a helpful resource for those new to Zig.
  3. A little bit of game design theory. Elvtr has a really nice article going over some of the fundamentals.

How to Use This Book

This book is best used by reading it, either with your eyeballs or with a screen reader if you have any sight-related disabilities (maybe one day I'll pay someone to record a dramatic, full-cast audio book for this, accepting volunteers!). In all seriousness, use this book however you want. It's written to be read front to back, but feel free to pop into whatever chapter you want and grab the information you need.

Source Code

This book is free, open source (under the MIT License), and entirely written in Markdown using mdBook to generate its static website. If you're interested in digging through the source code, you can find it in the main Manatee repository in the ./book directory.