game dev

People Make Games investigates how Roblox relies on young, often child, developers to build its content while paying them very little. It covers Roblox's monetization model, the revenue split, and the harms to kids who make games on the platform.

Ryan Gordon (Icculus) gives a high-level overview of SDL 2.0 at Steam Dev Days 2014. He covers its features and how it eases building, porting and maintaining games, including Linux ports.

David Brevik's GDC 2016 post-mortem of the original Diablo, covering how it evolved from a turn-based claymation DOS game into the genre-defining action RPG. It includes development anecdotes and lessons learned.

A Strange Loop talk presenting an open-source library that integrates Clojure into the Unity 3D game engine. It covers REPL-based live coding, macros, DSLs and persistent data structures for game development.

Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games explains at GDC 2016 how an indie developer survived eleven years without a hit by building a long tail of games and redefining success.

Catherine West's RustConf 2018 closing keynote on building a game in Rust and organizing a large codebase. It builds up an entity component system and generational indices step by step.

The first part of Freya Holmer's three-part, nearly four-hour lecture on shader coding for game devs in Unity. It covers what shaders are, vertex and fragment shaders, interpolators, data types, blending and textures.

Jonathan Blow's Reboot Develop 2017 talk on making game programming less terrible, discussing software bloat, slowness and the design goals behind his own programming language.

Jonathan Blow speaks at UC Berkeley's CSUA about how to program independent games. He argues for keeping code simple, avoiding unnecessary work, and shipping.

Zach Oakes explains why Clojure suits making games at runtime, so designers can experience their work as they build it. He combines abstract discussion with live demonstrations, drawing on his play-clj library and Nightmod tool.

Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains in Ars Technica's War Stories how localizing the game's logbook nearly sank the project.

Alexander Bruce's GDC talk on making Antichamber, from working alone in a bedroom to winning acclaim at the IGF. It focuses on the psychological challenge of seven years of solo development.

David Brevik's GDC 2016 postmortem of Diablo covers how it went from a turn-based claymation DOS concept to a real-time action RPG, plus the story of Blizzard North and development anecdotes.

David Crane's 2011 GDC postmortem of Pitfall, the classic Atari 2600 game. He explains how he created the game under the severe hardware limits of the console.

A game-dev video demonstrating a noise shader in Godot where shapes are visible only in motion against animated noise and vanish when the game is paused or screenshotted. The demo is available on GitHub.

The old announcement trailer for Hyperbolica, CodeParade's Unity game set in hyperbolic and spherical space. The creator has since posted devlog videos on building it.

At GDC 2019, Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage ask why game developers rarely sign their work. They argue that indie developers could benefit from putting their names on their games.

CodeParade's short devlog on how spherical geometry looks in 2D and 3D and why it feels so unusual, part of the Hyperbolica series on a non-Euclidean game.

A timelapse of Notch (Markus Persson) creating his Ludum Dare 21 entry, Prelude of the Chambered, from scratch in 48 hours.

A timelapse of Notch (Markus Persson) making Metagun, a game built from scratch in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 18. It shows the whole coding session sped up.

Modern Vintage Gamer looks at OpenLara, an open source Tomb Raider engine, running on the Game Boy Advance. The video explains how the port achieves playable speeds on the GBA's slow ARM CPU, with input from the developer XProger.

Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 postmortem of Another World (Out of This World), describing how he built the game. He shows his polygon art approach, rotoscoping and animation tools.

Jonathan Blow's CreativeMornings talk arguing that business models shape game design, drawing an analogy between 1970s TV and HBO and between free-to-play and premium games. He calls for games that inspire awe rather than chase constraints.

Pat Wyatt, a veteran game programmer who worked at Blizzard and ArenaNet, speaks at HandmadeCon 2015 in a conversation with Casey Muratori. He discusses network code and architecture in games he worked on, including mistakes on Diablo and the success of Guild Wars.

Adam Robinson-Yu's GDC 2020 talk on how he shelved a big project to prototype what became A Short Hike. He covers the solo development process and technical choices like a pixel shader over low-poly models.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

Michael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.

A 2017 GDC postmortem in which Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley tell how Civilization came together from board game design and sim game experience. They cover its development history and design decisions, including fairness and luck.

An hour-long, carefully sourced video essay from Ahoy asking what counts as a video game and which one was truly first. It examines Tennis for Two, Spacewar, Pong, the Brown Box and a 1947 CRT device.

Frederick Raynal gives a GDC postmortem of Alone in the Dark, the game that helped create the survival horror genre. He covers how the team built it and shows some of the old tools used.

A 2016 conference talk by a mobile game CEO on the tricks of free-to-play monetization, including player profiles and how to target high-spending whales.

A GameTrailers walkthrough from E3 2012 of an Unreal Engine 4 real-time tech demo with Epic's Alan Willard. It shows live code changes and hot reloading while the game runs.

Google I/O 2011 session by Ray Cromwell and Philip Rogers on writing 2D and 3D games with HTML5 and GWT. It covers porting game libraries and physics engines, sharing code with Android, and publishing to the Chrome Web Store, and showcases the ForPlay library.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

Stuart Ashen presents a talk at the 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival on Hareraiser, a notoriously bad video game tied to the Masquerade treasure hunt. He explores why it may be the worst game ever made.

A 2018 GDC panel where Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott and Rich Vogel look back on what went right and wrong building and running Ultima Online. They share candid stories from the early days, including player behavior and server architecture.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms makes a 76-minute argument that selling video games as a service is a form of consumer fraud. He lays out legal arguments that games are goods, covers ownership and programmed obsolescence, and discusses game preservation.

A roughly 75-minute video essay from Ahoy's RetroAhoy series on the making and history of The Secret of Monkey Island. It covers the small LucasArts team, the game's development and its sequel.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms lays out a campaign to stop publishers from permanently shutting down games, using The Crew as the test case. He covers government initiatives and the legal options, and the stopkillinggames.com site.

Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle talks about how pathfinding was solved in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, in an Ars Technica War Stories episode. It also touches on other challenges in Westwood's RTS games.