Hello, I've been trying to learn from the handmade hero archives. It seems to have gotten pretty deep pretty fast by say the 10th to the 26th episode. Honestly, it's going over my head a bit. Do things get clearer as it goes?
I have some c++ and c experience and a tad of windows programming but honestly, a lot of knowledge is dropping throughout the videos very quickly(like a ton of bricks).

Yes and no. It gets easier the more you do it, the more experience you get. Just like a test for school or playing piano, you need to practice. If you just watch Casey do it once, you will forget how to do it quite quickly. For example, I never really learned how he did fonts. I did watch the episodes, but I couldn't implement it myself from memory. I did watch the OpenGL stuff quite a bit, I could probably make a quick screen with a rotating textured cube from memory in an hour / a couple of hours or so.

i think you get better as you go and that makes it easier, but there is a ton of knowledge to absorb, and it can be mentally draining, kind of like learning a new voice language. i watched till about 230 pretty rigoursly, taking notes, & coding along. i think the more seperate experiments you do the better you get, and sometimes having a go at doing things different to casey and seeing how you could approach things differently. pretty much develop your own style as you go. also think in terms of return on investment, you can sink a lot of time into watching episodes, so watch as long as you’re getting enough out of them. as you get better, this might be skipping to different sections or combing the episode annotations.

I agree with Oliver's sentiment concerning doing your own project(s). I myself am coding my own fighting game and even though there are plenty of differences between mine and Casey's game I will still search around the videos for certain topics that overlap (rendering, animation, platform independent architecture, etc.). So I don't watch every video from start to finish but find the sections I find most relevant to me and really try and understand that section well before attempting to implement anything.

I had an even harder time right around episode seven because I am working on a Mac, and I'm too cheap to go and purchase a P.C. just to follow the series.

hahaha, I built my own Mac platform layer from scratch with a few scant resources to help along the way.

But honestly, I have to say it was much more of a learning experience to go that route, since the actual show served more as a guide than the literal steps I have to take. Forcing myself to reckon with the problems without any handholding has been way more educational than the series itself.

I can tell you this. I noticed a huge acceleration once I hit episode 26. The platform layer is a difficult but necessary part of setting up the project, and you will encounter a ton of concepts you don't understand, right out of the gate.

There's also this totally foreign thing called "procedural programming" that you'll have to learn, which basically isn't taught anymore. It's a complete mindset shift from the typical OOP thing you'll get in school. lol once you learn the procedural style, OOP just seems like this really confusing mess of indirection, so expect to become more opinionated.

I would say just charge through it and eventually the ideas will feel more like second nature. Do it gradually as you have time.

For reference, it took me half a year to get through the platform layer stuff. But once I did, the rest has seemed relatively breezy since.