The default video 'hardware' in QEMU is the Bochs "BGA" - you should look at that first, before VMware SVGA, as it's simpler and will get you working video in QEMU, Bochs, and VirtualBox (where it is also the default). We have an article on the wiki that should help:
https://wiki.osdev.org/BGA (Though do note that there are two different interfaces, one over MMIO and one over port I/O; you should do the port I/O version first, the MMIO version is a QEMU extension that allows it provide the same interface on architectures that do not have port I/O).
Once you have that working, the basic modesetting for VMware SVGA works in much the same way, just with different MMIO addresses.
I have drivers for all of these:
VMware,
Bochs port i/o, and
QEMU's MMIO interface.