Overview

Programming with the Gamebuino META is an incredible adventure. Making your first Pong is a thrill on such a unique little device. You are rapidly fascinated by the magic of the code. But very quickly, you realize that others already managed to create “real” games… with much more elaborate graphics than simple white rectangles sliding on a black background. So you may wonder “but how do I do that?”. And that’s when many people get disappointed and think that it’s too complicated, or even worse, that it’s not worth trying… Most of the time, this is because we feel lost before the complexity and the technicality of mechanisms that we do not understand.

Learning programming is an adventure that will bring you emotions as long as you will agree to invest in it. It is within the reach of everyone, but it only comes to those who give themselves the means to. And the journey that awaits you is filled with unavoidable struggles… like in a game. You must overcome the obstacles that come your way to discover the next level.

This tutorial is a modest contribution that I hope will allow you to take a step forward. It is a continuation of the first Gamebuino’s Academy workshops. So you need to go through these before you can get the full benefit of this tutorial.

The goal here is to help you better understand how to create and integrate images into your games, and especially how to bring them to life through programming. I won’t talk about the artistic aspect, or even the mastery of graphic tools for creating images, but rather about the technical constraints that you will have to meet in order to display them on your Gamebuino screen.

By the end of this tutorial, this is what you’ll be able to do:

Here is what we will achieve together

I hope this perspective will make you want to get through this tutorial. You’ll see that it’s not as complicated as it looks. Your Gamebuino comes with a software library, the well-known <Gamebuino-META.h>, which you’ll find in all the programs for META, and which will make your life much easier.

English is not my natural language, so I apologize in advance for any awkward wording I may have left out during the writing process. I have tried my best to keep the text from being too painful to read. I hope not to lose too many people on the way… And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Tom for taking the time to proofread this version and for pointing out a few heavy wordings.

So here we go ! Have fun…

Handling images on the Gamebuino META

Overview