I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it

Summary

tl;dr: I learned some Vulkan and made a game engine with two small game demos in 3 months. The code for the engine and the games can be found here: https://github.com/eliasdaler/edbr This article documents my experience of learning Vulkan and writing a small game/engine with it. It took me around 3 months to do it without any previous knowledge of Vulkan (I had previous OpenGL experience and some experience with making game engines, though). The engine wasn’t implemented as a general purpose engine, which is probably why it took me a few months (and not years) to achieve this. I started by making a small 3D game and separated reusable parts into the “engine” afterwards. I can recommend everyone to follow the same process to not get stuck in the weeds (see “Bike-shedding” section below for more advice). Preface I’m a professional programmer, but I’m self-taught in graphics programming. I started studying graphics programming around 1.5 years ago by learning OpenGL and writing a 3D engine in it. The engine I wrote in Vulkan is mostly suited for smaller level-based games. I’ll explain things which worked for me, but they might not be the most efficient. My implementation would probably still be a good starting point for many people. Hopefully, this article will help make some things about Vulkan clearer to you. But you also need to be patient. It took me months to implement what I have today and I did it by cutting corners in many places. But if a self-taught programmer like me can build something with Vulkan, then so can you! Learning graphics programming This is a very high level overview of how I learned some graphics programming myself. If there’s interest, I might write another article with more resources and helpful guidelines. If you haven’t done any graphics programming before, you should start with OpenGL. It’s much easier to learn it and not get overwhelmed by all the complexity that Vulkan has. A lot of your OpenGL and graphics programming knowledge will be ...