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Build a real game in Go — and understand every line of it.

Most game tutorials hand you an engine and ask you to fill in the blanks. This book does the opposite. Starting from an empty window, you build Gopher Survivor — a complete, Vampire Survivors–style action game — in Go and Ebitengine, writing the game loop, the scene graph, the camera, collisions, and everything else yourself. No drag-and-drop editor, no black boxes: just code you can read, reason about, and reshape into your own game.

The book grows one project across fourteen chapters. Every chapter is the previous chapter plus a small, deliberate diff, and the game compiles at every step — so you're never lost in a wall of code, and you always have something you can run.

What you'll build

A polished survivors-style game: a gopher that moves across an infinite tiled world, auto-firing weapons that unlock and upgrade, waves of scaling enemies and a mini-boss, XP orbs and level-ups, health and upgrade panels, a main-menu / pause / options state machine, music and sound effects, particles, screen shake, and floating damage numbers — packaged into a native executable and a browser (WebAssembly) build you can hand to anyone.

What you'll learn

The Ebitengine game loop and frame-rate-independent updates
A scene graph of nodes with local and world transforms, a camera, and draw layers
An input layer that maps named actions to keys
Circle-based collision detection with layer masks
Weapons built with the Strategy pattern, object pooling, and a level-up upgrade system
Enemy difficulty curves, a state machine for game flow, audio, and game-feel polish
Packaging and shipping to desktop and the web

Who this book is for

You already know Go; you've never built a game. This book won't teach you syntax — it teaches game development: the patterns, the architecture, and the small tricks that make a game feel alive. If you can write Go and you're curious how a game actually works under the hood, this is for you.

Why Go and Ebitengine? Fast compiles, a single shippable binary, trivial cross-platform builds, and a clean 2D library that stays out of your way. You spend your time building your game, not fighting the framework.

Get the code — every chapter's complete, runnable project is on GitHub, one directory per chapter: https://github.com/LuigiVanacore/beginning-game-programming-go-ebitengine

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Kick off your book project, get started with GhostAI, get better at marketing, or spend the day doing all three! Free live workshops on Zoom. Saturday, June 27, 2026.

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