Beef Game Development for Beginners

Turn basic programming knowledge into a playable 2D game with Beef.

Beef Game Development for Beginners guides you through Beacon Run: a small game in which you steer a ship toward five beacons, avoid moving hazards, and race against a countdown. Each chapter develops another part of the same project, helping you understand how individual systems connect.

Using Beef and raylib, you will explore the decisions behind responsive movement, sprite animation, collision rules, resource ownership, and practical debugging. Clear explanations, prediction exercises, diagrams, and complete project listings connect the concepts to code you can study and reconstruct.

Inside you will learn to:
• Set up the demonstrated Windows x64 development environment and understand the build, link, and loading stages.
• Follow the game loop, handle keyboard input, and make movement respond to elapsed time.
• Create and animate a small sprite, work with coordinates, and implement rectangle collisions.
• Manage game states, scoring, timers, resets, visual feedback, and generated audio samples.
• Reason about memory ownership, borrowed data, resource lifetimes, and cleanup.
• Use focused checks and measurements to investigate bugs and interpret performance results.

You do not need previous experience with Beef or graphics programming. You should already recognize variables, conditions, loops, and functions. This guide builds on that foundation with a structured route from the first successful build to a complete game project you can understand, rebuild, and extend.