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Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm
Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm - Personal blog about game development, programming and making
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years?
If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions…
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What I Learned Failing to Finish a Game in 2024
Here’s a breakdown of my year in game dev, the challenges I faced, and the key takeaways that’ll shape my 2025 projects.
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Standard patterns in choice-based games (2015)
When I was analysing the structures of CYOA works a few years back, I began to recognise some strong recurring design patterns. I came up with some home-brewed terminology, but didn’t ever la…
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Mac Mini G4 – The best « classic » Macintosh for retro-gaming?
The Mac Mini G4 promises to be compatible with almost every Macintosh software released until the early 2000s. This article explains why and puts the machine to the test.
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Portals and Quake
Ever wanted to know how exactly did Quake’s precomputed visibility work? I did, so I wrote vis.py , a reimplementation of their algorithm in Python. This guide has all the information you need to understand vis , the tool used by Quake, Half-Life and Source Engine games.
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Railroad Tycoon II
Like a lot of boys, I grew up loving trains. And like a lot of men, I retain my fascination for them today.
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A minimax chess engine in regular expressions
I wrote a (list of) regular expressions that will play a (not very good) chess game by running a 2-ply minimax search.
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Synthesizing Music from JSON
tl;dr: pl_synth is a tiny music synthesizer for C & JS and an editor (“tracker”) to create instruments and arrangements.
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Spline Distance Fields
Earlier this year I decided to put my main project Tangerine on hold indefinitely and began prototyping a new renderer in an unfamiliar language using a totally new graphics API with the goal of overcoming all of Tangerine's technical shortcomings. The new renderer is an eccentric CPU ray tracer called Star Machine…
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One Dog vs. the Windows 3.1 Graphics Stack
a bunch of weird and random technical stuff
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How to draw an outline in a video game
🖍️ Explaining multiple techniques for rendering outlines and highlights for real-time applications. This includes vertex object-space as well as screen-space methods. This can be used to render outlines in Unity or Unreal. Outlines can be used for gameplay reasons or aesthetics.
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Mandelbrot deep zoom theory and practice (2021)
Perturbation and rescaling for efficient rendering of fractal images.
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Building Game Prototypes with LÖVE
Chess, card games, and Lua.
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I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig
The Game Boy Advance is an interesting game console. It has a modern-style CPU (32-bit ARM, lots of registers), but uses an old-fashioned tile based renderer like how the NES did it in the 80s. Don’t get me wrong, since its one of Nintendo’s last tile-based systems, they took the idea as far as it can go with fancy…
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Finding and exploiting hidden features of Animal Crossing's NES emulator (2018)
While looking for ways to activate the developer menus left over in Animal Crossing, including the NES emulator game selection menu, I found an interesting feature that exists in the original game that was always active, but never used by Nintendo. In addition to the NES/Famicom games that can be obtained in-game, it…
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Penrose Mazes (2020)
Mazes are typically constructed on regular grids: square, triangular, hexagonal, etc. But what if you generate a maze on top of a Penrose tiling, which is guaranteed to be irregular? (It is an aperiodic tiling .) The resulting mazes have a very characteristic appearance: they are filled with circles and stars, but the…
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Learning Solver Design: Automating Factorio Balancers
I built a Factorio belt balancer solver. From tiny 2x2 grids to a massive 16x16 monster, every step revealed new solver tricks, numeric hiccups, and devious debugging puzzles.
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1584 LAN party photos from 1996 – 2010 from Australia's island state archived
In July 2023 I was reminiscing about a thing of the past, large-scale public LAN parties. I remember them being a semiregular occurrence around Tasmania, only attending a couple in my young age before they disappeared. I wondered if I could find some photos of these events to help the memories come back clearer. After…
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Lou's Pseudo 3D Page (2013)
Previous update: An explanation of 3d projection mathematics (under Road Basics) and analysis of Activision's Enduro (under Case Studies)! Thanks to everyone for all the e-mail! Keep it coming :) Sorry, I can't answer questions about when I'll post source code, but I'm always happy to answer anything else about these…
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Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
Solving AoC on the DS with Rust.
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Reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format
Sega Channel was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable…
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Tweaking Stunt Island's 30-year-old 3D engine
Note: the patch is available at the end of the article ( HERE ). This post is about its making-of.
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A simple way to scale pixel art games
Previously in How to present MS-DOS screenshots , I encouraged readers to take the original pixel aspect ratio into account when showing pictures of old games. There’s also a subtler issue to consider: the blur analog display systems had.
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Map UI – Ghost in the Shell
Map UI (User Interface) for the film “Ghost in the Shell” Copyright Shirow Masamune / Kodansha • Bandai Visual • Manga Entertainment •
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How to print your Guild Wars 2 character
2025 update v2: I made a tool that fixes distortions introduced by Intel GPA, and that tool made few sections of this blog obsolete. As such, they’ve been deleted. Old version is still available here.2025 update. This blog post now also exists as a youtube video. Yes, the video is 1 hour 20, so about twice as long as…