2D Game Physics Programming

This course is a gentle introduction into the world of 2D game physics! We'll review all the beautiful math that provides the foundation for most physics engines, starting with a strong review of vectors, matrices, basic trigonometry, rigid-body collision, and touching a little bit of calculus as well.

The lectures are designed to teach all concepts from first principles. In our journey, we'll review several topics from physics, like velocity, acceleration, integration, mass, forces, gravity, drag, friction, rigid body dynamics, collision detection, constraints, etc.

We'll also put theory into practice by coding a very simple 2D physics engine from scratch using the C++ programming language.

We'll start by writing a simulation of particle physics, which is a good start for us to address concepts like movement, forces, displacement, and integration.

We'll then proceed to work with rigid bodies by adding shapes to our objects, like circles, rectangles, and polygons. We'll also learn how to code the collision detection and collision resolution between these rigid bodies.

We'll conclude our C++ implementation by adding constraints to our physics engine, which will help us add different types of objects to our engine, like joints and ragdolls. Ultimately, constraints will help us improve the stability of our engine, and they are a great opportunity for us to discuss some interesting ideas from calculus.

The tools you'll need

All you really need is a simple code editor and a C++ compiler. We'll use a cross-platform library called SDL to display our graphics, and since we can find a C++ compiler for virtually any operating system, you can follow along on either Windows, macOS, or Linux!

Also, make sure you have pen and paper ready for the lectures. This course will probably be a little bit different than other programming courses you took before. We will take our sweet time and make sure we understand every formula we find along the way!