Gaming
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2D Vehicles
Pat Kerr tells how a weekend 1996 physics prototype in GFA BASIC became the vehicle system of Grand Theft Auto, with the…
A Brief History of Rogue
Glenn Wichman, co-creator of Rogue, recounts how the 1980 dungeon crawler was built on Unix machines at UC Santa Cruz an…
A Brief History of Spore
An essay on the long, winding design history of Will Wright's game Spore and the ideas that shaped it from early prototy…
A Chronology of Star Wars Games
A long, lovingly researched chronology of every Star Wars videogame ever released, from arcade cabinets to tie-in odditi…
A Complete History of Birdo's Gender
A thorough history of how Nintendo has described Birdo since Doki Doki Panic, comparing English and Japanese manuals, ga…
A File Format Uncracked for 20 Years
A reverse-engineering detective story about decoding a mysterious game asset format from a classic Splinter Cell title t…
A most profound video game
Biologist Michael Levin argues that the puzzle game Baba Is You trains the kind of flexible thinking needed to explore l…
A Real-Time 3D Shader on the Game Boy Color
A tinkerer pushes a Game Boy Color to render a real-time 3D shaded scene, explaining the math, the workflow and the tric…
A Story of GameLayers, Inc.
Justin Hall's candid, richly illustrated memoir of GameLayers, the startup that turned the whole web into a multiplayer…
A Toy RTOS Inside Super Mario Bros.
A mind-bending experiment that implements threads and a tiny operating system inside Super Mario Bros. on the NES using…
A World Building Checklist
A checklist of topics to cover when building a fantasy world for tabletop games, from geography and cultures to religion…
A* Tricks for Videogame Path Finding
A visual walkthrough of how game characters find their way, from straight lines and Dijkstra to A-star, with diagrams an…
paxsims.wordpress.com
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Ace of Aces: Why You Should Do Maths as a Game Designer
A game designer digs into the math behind Ace of Aces, the clever two-book dogfight game, and shows how counting probabi…
Al Lowe - Don't Die
A long candid interview with Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry, recalling his years at Sierra On-Line in the 80s an…
AlphaZero: Shedding New Light on Chess, Shogi, and Go
Google DeepMind's account of how AlphaZero taught itself chess, shogi, and Go from scratch and then beat the strongest p…
thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com
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Arcade Authorship - High Score Table Credits
How 1980s arcade designers, denied on-screen credit, smuggled their initials and names into default high score tables -…
Around the World, Part 30: Making Better Waves
A deep dive into rendering pixelated water waves, covering how the author models and draws ocean waves in a procedural w…
Atari CX-2000
A museum page on the Atari CX-2000, a strange 1982 prototype 2600 redesign with built-in joysticks, explaining why Atari…
Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
An essay on why grinding levels in RPGs and chasing achievements feels so satisfying, and how games hand out a sense of…
Battleship
A playful deep dive into overengineering the game of Battleship, using probability heatmaps and information gain to work…
Black Triangles
Rampant Coyote explains the game developer idea of the black triangle, the unglamorous technical milestone that looks li…
Blocky Planet
A detailed, illustrated dive into the design problems of building a spherical planet out of Minecraft-like cubes, with i…
bontegames: 2024 Top 10 Web Games
Belgian puzzle designer Bart Bonte picks his ten favourite browser games of 2024, each with a short write-up and a link…
B-trees in Factorio
A playful attempt to learn how database B-trees work by building them out of belts and logic in the factory-building gam…
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