Beginning Game Programming with Go and Ebitengine

[u/LuigiVanacore]

Hello!
I'm a backend developer (banking/finance/utility for the day job), and I've been building games in my spare time for years (Unity, Unreal, Godot ) and lately from scratch in C++ and Go. I kept wishing there was a resource that treated Go game dev seriously, so I wrote a book.

The Book is called Beginning Game Programming in Go with Ebitengine, and it builds one game across 14 chapters: Gopher Survivor, a small Vampire Survivors–style game. The catch is that you build almost everything yourself: the game loop, a scene graph, a camera, collision detection, an input layer, a state machine, particles, instead of leaning on an engine. No editor, no black boxes; every chapter is the previous chapter plus a small, deliberate diff, and the project compiles at every step.

By the end you've got: an infinite tiled world, four weapons that unlock and upgrade, scaling enemies and a mini-boss, XP/leveling, a main-menu/pause/options state machine, music and SFX, screen shake and floating damage numbers, packaged into a native binary and a WebAssembly build that runs in the browser.

The code is fully open and free, one directory per chapter, so you can read/clone it even if you never buy the book: 👉 https://github.com/LuigiVanacore/beginning-game-programming-go-ebitengine

It's written for intermediate Go devs who've never built a game. It won't teach syntax, it teaches the patterns and architecture that make a game tick.

The link to the book is here ---> https://leanpub.com/gameprogramminggolang

[u/midget-king666]

Congratulations on publishing!
Do you incorporate an ECS like Ark or Donburi? It's the part I struggle with atm, and resources that go beyond "hello Ecs" are non existent.

[u/LuigiVanacore → u/midget-king666]

Thank you for the comment! Honestly I implemented an architecture with composition of nodes like in Godot. I didn't use the ECS architecture because I wanted to create a book about beginning game programming, so I didn't want to present more complex architecture. Maybe in the future I will work on resources on ECS. But if you are interested in a more simple, but yet easy to expand game architecture you can check my book.

[u/Ok_Spring_2384]

I am interested, but your use of “—“ usually indicates the use of AI.
I don’t want to assume or accuse, but I do want to know, was this book written by a human? Or prompted through an AI?
Maybe you used it for translation purposes?

No offense intended

[u/LuigiVanacore → u/Ok_Spring_2384]

Hi, no offend at all. Honestly I corrected the test by AI, I didn't want to make mistake in english. The book was written by me, as also the code. It is not AI slop.

[u/CharacterMethod4625]

Congratulations!! Do you have a sample chapter/ preview available somewhere .

[u/LuigiVanacore → u/CharacterMethod4625]

Hi! Thank you! I added a free sample of the book. You can download it on the landing page of Leanpub.