Hello Everyone,
I recently began upon programming my first serious game and I ran upon an SDL tutorial on appstates. The only issue is, I don't want to use SDL. Could anyone inform me on how to create appstates and an appstate manager? I just need it to do the basic stuff: Play an initial animation saying who the game was made by----> hand control over to the main menu------> hand control over to the game or credits --------> hand control to an in game menu.

I used the same GameState class I used for my SDL game as I did for my OpenGL iPhone app. The way I did it, there was no SDL or OpenGL code in the management of the game states, only in the implementation of the individual game states.

It's usually referred to as a "game state manager" - that at least will yield you several results on Google. Also see the related "state pattern".

I was in a similar situation with my last game but ultimately settled on writing my own when each and every example either tightly coupled the game states to a specific engine or library, or decided to hard-code it for one purpose.

If you can use it, I have published my code together with a small article showing how to avoid common design pitfalls here: Game State Management.