I’m logging this one while it’s still fresh, because it looked trivial and somehow turned into a quiet little macOS puzzle.
The target was SDL Ball (game), a small SDL-based title I grabbed while testing a batch of lightweight indie builds under the NimbusApps umbrella. Nothing fancy. I just wanted to confirm it launched cleanly on macOS and behaved like a normal, well-mannered app.
It didn’t.
What I wanted to do
Launch the game, see a window, bounce a ball around for thirty seconds, move on. This was on macOS Ventura 13.6 running on an M1 Mac mini, which is usually very forgiving with simple SDL projects.
What broke
Double-click. Dock icon appeared, bounced once, then disappeared. No dialog. No crash reporter. No Gatekeeper warning. It was as if the game politely excused itself before saying hello.
At first glance, this felt familiar. Not a crash, not a block — just an immediate exit.
First attempt: classic Gatekeeper paranoia
I assumed macOS security was being macOS security.
Right-click → Open. Same result. Checked System Settings → Privacy & Security to see if there was an “app was blocked” message waiting for approval. Nothing. No allow-anyway button, no warnings.
Apple’s own explanation of how Gatekeeper behaves in these cases lives on support.apple.com, and this didn’t match the pattern. When Gatekeeper blocks you, it usually tells you, sometimes loudly.
Dead end.
Second attempt: blaming SDL and architecture
Next theory: SDL + Apple Silicon weirdness. Maybe it was an Intel-only build without proper arm64 support.
Activity Monitor showed the process appear for a fraction of a second, then vanish. No Rosetta spike, no sustained CPU usage. That usually means the app exited intentionally, not that it crashed.
I briefly considered rebuilding or re-signing it, but before going down that rabbit hole I decided to see what the game itself thought was happening.
Third attempt: letting Terminal talk
Launching it from Terminal was the first genuinely useful move.
The error wasn’t dramatic. Just a complaint about failing to create or access a writable directory for preferences or saves. No permission prompt, no fallback — it simply exited.
This is a classic macOS privacy edge case: if a game tries to touch certain directories too early, before the OS can present a permission dialog, macOS denies the request silently. SDL apps are especially prone to this if they assume they can write wherever they want on startup.
Apple documents this behavior fairly clearly on developer.apple.com when discussing app sandboxing and file system access, but you don’t really internalize it until an app vanishes without a trace.
What actually worked
The fix was almost boring once I knew where to look.
I made sure the game bundle lived in /Applications, not Downloads. Then I went straight to System Settings → Privacy & Security → Files and Folders and manually granted access to common locations like Documents.
After that, I launched the game again.
This time, macOS did what it should have done earlier: it asked for permission. Once approved, the window appeared instantly. The ball bounced. Physics worked. Sound worked. No further issues.
I checked apps.apple.com to see if there was an App Store build that handled this more gracefully, but there doesn’t seem to be an official listing. That’s not unusual for small SDL games, but it does mean you inherit all the rough edges of manual distribution.
I ended up saving this page because it helped me sanity-check that I wasn’t dealing with a corrupted build, just macOS being macOS:
https://treadmillreviews.online/game/49202-sdl-ball.html
It didn’t give me a magic command, but it pointed me toward launch behavior and environment assumptions, which turned out to be the real issue.
One wrong turn I didn’t need
I almost re-signed the app locally. That would have been pointless. The binary wasn’t blocked or untrusted — it simply didn’t have permission to do what it wanted at startup.
That distinction matters. Re-signing helps with Gatekeeper. It does nothing for privacy denials.
How I’d do it immediately next time
If I had to test another small SDL game tomorrow, I’d skip the guesswork:
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Move it to /Applications first
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Assume it will need file access, even if it’s “just a game”
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If it quits silently, launch from Terminal once and read the error
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Only think about signatures or notarization after permissions are ruled out
Once that’s sorted, the game behaves exactly as expected. No hacks, no weird flags, no voodoo. Just a reminder that on modern macOS, silence is often a permission problem wearing a disguise.
Filed as: “Five minutes of gameplay, forty minutes of understanding why it wouldn’t start.”