game programming

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.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia analyzes Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the first AAA game built around ray tracing. It covers the new global illumination, emissive lighting, DLSS and performance on AMD and Nvidia hardware.

Extra Credits explains from a game developer's perspective why AAA games have stayed at $60 despite inflation, and how that pressure drives DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes.

An Extra Credits episode on how games use Skinner box operant conditioning and reward schedules to keep players playing and spending. It argues for more immersive design mechanics than simple reward loops.

Veritasium explores the Prisoner's Dilemma and Axelrod's tournaments, showing why tit-for-tat and forgiving strategies win in repeated games. It extends the ideas to cooperation in evolution and conflict.

Roaring Kitty's July 2020 analysis of GameStop, arguing a bullish deep-value case when the stock was about $4 and short interest exceeded 100%. It covers fundamentals, cash balance and technicals.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains single-pile Nim and the trick that wins it, using Dr NIM, a 1960s mechanical plastic computer that plays perfectly. He teaches the strategy so viewers can beat friends.

Game Maker's Toolkit examines Nintendo's design approach of starting from a core play mechanic, making it fun, and building around it. Examples include Mario's jump and Luigi's Mansion's vacuum.

Linkus7 explains how a community reverse-engineered The Wind Waker to predict its random number generator and beat the Sploosh Kaboom battleship minigame consistently. It includes d3 animations by Peter Schmidt-Nielsen.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained shows how the Atari 2600 draws images with almost no video memory, by having the CPU race the CRT beam line by line. It walks through the techniques in detail.

Pannenkoek explains how Super Mario 64 handles wall, floor and ceiling collisions, including triangles, normal vectors, quarter steps and out of bounds. It is a detailed 37-minute technical walkthrough of the game's physics.

Owen Maitzen's animated hour-long introduction to Hackenbush, a simple combinatorial game, and how its strategy leads to surreal numbers and the roots of the number system.

A short Coding Secrets episode explaining why hitting a Sonic 3D cartridge triggers a hidden level select. The cause was a custom crash handler that redirected CPU error interrupts to the level select screen.

An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks how the amount and application method of thermal paste affect CPU cooling. It compares pea-sized dots, thin spreads and large blobs with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.

Martin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm using Sudoku-like constraint solving and shows how he implemented it with Blender and Godot. It links demos and reference articles.

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.

agadmator walks through a game in which DeepMind's AlphaZero beat Stockfish, ending in a famous zugzwang that leaves the engine helpless. He gives commentary on the moves.

Two Minute Papers covers OpenAI's multi-agent hide-and-seek experiment, in which agents learned emergent tool use and found ways to break the game's rules. It summarizes the 'Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction' paper.

Kaze Emanuar searches for the best sine approximation for the Nintendo 64, comparing the lookup tables in Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time with polynomial alternatives. It walks through numerics and 3rd, 4th and 5th order approximations.

SalC1 explains how the seed behind the Minecraft title screen panorama was found, using community effort and the Minecraft@Home project. It covers the search through Beta 1.7.3 world seeds.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained dissects how Atari's Quadrascan vector displays and vector generator hardware drew games like Asteroids and Tempest.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

Pannenkoek2012's commentated tool-assisted Super Mario 64 run collecting the Watch for Rolling Rocks star with half an A press, using parallel universes and QPU movement. The video is marked outdated in favor of a newer version.

An Extra Credits episode on China's Sesame Credit, which gamifies obedient citizenship through a social score. It covers how the system rewards conformity and pressures people through their friends' behavior.

A short animated TED-Ed lesson in which two competing ice cream vendors on a beach illustrate why rival shops cluster together. It introduces game theory and the Nash equilibrium through the Hotelling model.

Veritasium explains why many real-world systems follow power laws rather than normal distributions. It covers self-organized criticality, with simulations of sandpiles, magnetism and forest fires.

A speedrunner-made explanation of the Super Mario World credits warp, an arbitrary code execution glitch that jumps the game straight to the ending. It simplifies the underlying assembly and memory behavior with animations so non-experts can follow.

8-Bit Show And Tell walks through the BASIC source code of the original Commodore 64 Sid Meier's Pirates!. It covers bugs, quirks and traces of abandoned features and scenarios left in the code.

Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG argues that gifted kids can be seen as special needs, tracing a path from the gifted label to burnout and perfectionism.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks the Ryzen 9 7950X in its BIOS Eco Mode presets (65W, 105W and stock 170W). It measures the performance cost against the power and heat savings.

Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG explains why people feel unmotivated and unable to start tasks after hours of YouTube or similar distractions. He frames it as a result of how social media is designed to capture attention, and says not to blame yourself.

aGameScout explains rolling, the third major NES Tetris playstyle, in which players tap the back of the controller to move pieces faster than hypertapping. It covers how the technique works and where it comes from.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why handling time and timezones in code is so hard, walking through a simple web app that computes how long ago something happened. It covers the quirks of timezones and calendars and ends in an exasperated rant.

Noodle explores how retro pixel art was designed for CRT displays and why games look different on LCDs, with input from pixel artists and CRT researchers.

Primer simulates green beard altruism, where individuals recognize and help others carrying a shared marker, and shows how imposters affect its evolution. It is an animated evolution simulation based on published papers.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.