This is a simple quiz game / app to help the player learn common butterflies native to North America, written from scratch in Zig / raylib.
This is a Zig project that natively calls raylib code (which is written in C). (More on dependencies below.)
Since the Zig compiler comes with its own build system and is also a C compiler, the project can be built and run with the command
zig build run
A release build can be created with the following command.
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
Building the project requires the compiler version to be 0.13.0 at minimum. The project has been tested with the Zig 0.13.0 compiler on Windows 11, available from the download page on ziglang.org. Compilation of the game on other operating systems has not been tested.
All photos in this project are from Wikimedia Commons . As such, they have all been released under various Creative Commons / Public Domain licenses. Links to the sources of these photos, their authors, and to the exact licenses of the photos can be found in the photo-source-license-links.csv file. We recommend using Modern CSV (webpage) to view the .csv file.
The list of butterflies was taken from the book Familiar Butterflies of North America (National Audubon Society, 1990, Knopf, ISBN: 978-0-679-72981-5). By default, the order of butterflies that appear in the quiz are randomized, but if they were to appear sequentially (as in the .csv file), they would appear in the same order as the do in the book.
The project is written in Zig and uses the raylib library, specifically v5.5 (commit number c1ab645). We included the necessary source files from raylib directly in our project (under the deps/raylib_5_5 directory), but deleted unnecessary parts of the library (like its numerous examples).
Raylib is created by Ramon Santamaria (GitHub handle @raysan5) and is available on GitHub here. See the link above for Raylib's full license / copywrite details.
The entire development of this app (basically) was streamed on Twitch and recordings were uploaded to YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/@10aded
The project was originally built with the Zig 0.11.0 compiler, and was updated to work with 0.13.0 of the compiler on 17 June 2024.
The project was originally built using Raylib 5, but was updated to use Raylib 5.5 on 31 Jan 2025.