You may need some GUI for the game, it may make no sense to make it without GUI, as GUI can be done quite simply. You may look at my GUI widget toolkit, this is in another thread here, maybe you saw it [kiss_sdl] (Kiss_sdl - Simple universal GUI widget toolkit for SDL) . As you mentioned LazyFoo, if you want to make a GUI similar to the code in the LazyFoo tutorials, so that you don’t need to know much more than is written in these tutorials, yet you can change everything there, then that GUI toolkit may be for you.
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kiss_sdl - Simple generic GUI widget toolkit for SDL2 https://github.com/actsl/kiss_sdl