game engine

Brian Bucklew of Freehold Games discusses design decisions behind Caves of Qud and Sproggiwood at IRDC 2015. The talk centers on data-driven, event-driven engine design.

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.

Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.

A 2015 GDC talk by Bungie's Barry Genova on how Destiny's engine was restructured into a job graph with limited thread pre-emption. It is aimed at programmers of demanding game engines.

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.

A 2017 GDC session in which Nintendo's Breath of the Wild team walks through how the game's convention-breaking systems were built. It covers the 'chemistry engine' of material interactions and shows the early 2D prototype footage.

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.

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.

In this 2019 GDC session, Petri Purho of Nolla Games explains the technical side of Noita's physics engine, including scaling a falling-sand simulation to large continuous worlds and adding destructible rigid bodies. It also shows how the emergent physics drives the gameplay.

Bob Nystrom, author of Game Programming Patterns, gives a Roguelike Celebration 2018 talk questioning whether entity component systems are the only way to structure a game. He walks through alternative architectures drawn from roguelike development.

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.

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.

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.

A reverse engineer walks through fixing a ten-year-old bug in Guitar Hero III without access to its source code, using a disassembler and decompiler. It is technical but explained step by step.

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.

CppCon 2014 talk by Jeff Preshing on how Ubisoft Montreal developed games for multicore hardware, before and after C++11 concurrency support. It goes into atomics and lock-free programming in practice.

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.

Casey Muratori's remastered BICFest 2018 talk on how the collision system of The Witness was engineered to prevent whole classes of bugs found in game engines. It covers character movement and collision handling.

Jonathan Blow talks at Gamelab 2018 about the design decisions behind Jai, the programming language he is building for game programmers. He covers low-friction development, quality of life and the effects of compile times.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

Bungie's David Aldridge explains the networking programming behind Halo: Reach in a 2011 GDC session. It covers how gameplay stays in sync online, including forecasting and state reconciliation.

Part 4 of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2013 keynote, covering OpenGL, functional programming, Haskell, Lisp and Scheme, typing, multithreading, events and garbage collection.

Dennis Gustafsson, creator of Teardown, presents how he parallelized the physics solver for an upcoming game, followed by a Q&A. The talk was given at the Better Software Conference 2025.

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

Alen Ladavac of Croteam talks about continuous integration and automated testing pipelines in games, with case studies from The Talos Principle and Serious Sam.

FOSDEM 2020 talk from Collabora on pressure-vessel, an experimental mechanism that puts Steam games in containers on Linux. It covers using namespaces to give games their own runtime library stack independent of the host.

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.

David Crane, designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600, gives a GDC 2011 postmortem on the game's design challenges. He covers how he fit a large world into the console's tiny memory. The session ends with Q&A.

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.

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

A 2018 GDC talk by NetherRealm's Michael Stallone on the engine changes, optimizations and tooling needed to roll back and re-simulate up to 8 frames in 16 ms in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2. It is a deep dive into deterministic rollback netcode.

Dan Liebgold of Naughty Dog gives a RacketCon 2013 keynote on using Racket in PlayStation 3 game development. He explains the Racket-based DSLs used for game data and scripting, which replaced the studio's earlier GOAL-based toolchain.

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.

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.

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.

Jonathan Blow's 2010 Rice University talk argues that game designers refine their techniques in ways that can manipulate players, as with A/B-tested social games. He discusses the ethical responsibility of designers and what games can offer beyond addiction.

Media Molecule's Alex Evans recounts the journey, including the failures, of finding the Dreams engine, based on his Siggraph 2015 talk. It covers the signed-distance-field and splat-based rendering approach and the artistic goals behind it.

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.

PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny gives a deep dive into the PS5's architecture, covering its SSD, I/O, audio and design goals. He explains how removing bottlenecks shapes future games.

Glenn Vanderburg argues at Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 that university-style software engineering does not work, and asks what real software engineering would look like. He revisits the waterfall model and what engineering means in other fields.