gunslinger VS pacman.c

Here's a framework that's cool: https://github.com/MrFrenik/gunslinger/. We have a great Discord community, too. Even if you don't end up using it, there are plenty of people who are willing to offer guidance regardless :). Invite link is on the author's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_HxKDNuCqA

Check out gunslinger, a pure C99 game framework, with a very clean design.

The development has been making huge strides and they have a fairly active discord channel:

https://github.com/MrFrenik/gunslinger

Make your own. If you really want to make a game in C, this may be the best option. Depending on how complex the game is that you want to make, this could be an enormous task, or not too big of a deal, in some cases it could even be easier than learning a game engine. You can use frameworks like Gunslinger to make it easier, as well. If you need guidance, the Gunslinger community is friendly and accepting of beginners :).

That being said, you may have your requirements satisfied with tagged unions which consists in implementing a struct with an anonymous union and label (like an enum) to keep track of what data is inside the union, this works really well when you know beforehand which data types you want to support. Another technique could be using macros, like the containers on the gunslinger framework, however I have never implemented something like this. Lastly you can always use void pointers, however you may need to be more clever to achieve it (I almost never use them).

Some of my favorites are: sokol/pacman.c, Gunslinger, and gb

And here is Github of his game engine of this guy: Gunslinger Game Engine

To install non exotic library from a github repo, specify just the repo-owner/repo-name or the absolute github link to the repo. E.g. to install gunslinger and stb from master branch

Looking quickly at this lib, functions of the API are not static: https://github.com/MrFrenik/gunslinger/blob/d5ebcce0647e97badc9337749d7cd9f5810eecfa/gs.h#L1415, so it might lead to ODR violation.

Floooh's pacman.c is an outstanding one file implementation of Pacman in C. He uses his own very good libraries (called sokol) to do the graphics and audio but you can definitely learn a lot from reading the code. It is very accurate too - it's based off the Pacman Dossier (copy included).

Some of my favorites are: sokol/pacman.c, Gunslinger, and gb

Not "serious" at all but I wrote a Pacman clone over the holidays as an excercise and test for my cross-platform C header bindinds:

https://github.com/floooh/pacman.zig

...and before that I did the same in C99 (might be useful for comparing the languages):

https://github.com/floooh/pacman.c

Disclaimer: I'm not a Zig expert at all, and the project doesn't really require most things where Zig differs from C. But I think writing small and "for-fun" projects like this is important for getting used to a language. I think one of Zig's big qualities is that it is so straightforward, after a few hundred lines you hardly have to look up things in the language documentation anymore.