Smol is not really small itself, but it is perfect for small things.

It is a C11 library designed for making 2D games and prototypes.

The main goal is wide compatibility, so the rendering layer uses OpenGL ES2 with SDL3.
Using ANGLE as a backend can be automated as well.

• Batched rendering of 2D primitives
• Textures can be applied to ALL drawable primitives
• Font loading and text rendering
• Transformation matrix stack support
• Custom shaders (similar to Löve2D), where you only need to define:

  vec4 vertex(mat4 mvp, vec3 position);
  vec4 pixel(vec4 color, sampler2D tex, vec2 uv, vec2 screen_pos);

• Canvas support (framebuffers)
• Mesh support (single attribute pattern sl_vertex: position, texcoord, normal, color)
• Simplified stencil support
• Control over depth test/write/range, and even viewport, scissors, etc

• Audio support with samples and streams (WAV/FLAC/MP3/OGG)
• Built on mojoAL (OpenAL 1.1)
• Polyphony for samples (choose the number of 'channels' at load time)
• Stream decoding is asynchronous and automatically updated
• Volume control for samples, stream, and a master factor (all globaly applied)

Most resources in Smol are managed by ID handles:

• sl_texture_id
• sl_canvas_id
• sl_shader_id
• sl_mesh_id
• sl_font_id
• sl_sample_id
• sl_stream_id

These resources are automatically destroyed on shutdown, so you don’t need to free them manually.

Exception: sl_image_t is not ID-based and must be freed explicitly, as images are often used for intermediate manipulation and need more flexibility.

• General math and helper functions
• Easing functions (all the classics are included)
• Vectors
• Quaternions
• 4x4 matrices
• String manipulation utilities
• PCG32 based random number generator

Smol is a small ... toolkit that gathers many of the things you usually need to build a prototype, a 2D game, or just a small program.

What Smol will not include:

• Physics
• A full 3D engine
• Highly specialized features

These depend too much on the type of project you want to build. The goal is to keep Smol simple, flexible, and portable.

Yes, you can technically do 3D with Smol. There is even an example with a cube and basic lighting. However, you will quickly hit limitations.

This library was designed with 2D in mind. If you want complete support for mesh loading, 3D asset handling, or advanced rendering, you will have to extend it yourself.

Smol provides:

• A collection of small, useful building blocks
• A straightforward approach to 2D rendering and utilities
• Enough to get prototypes running quickly

And if it is not enough for you... well, you can always look elsewhere! :p

This project is licensed under the zlib license.