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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre?
I replayed Warcraft III recently and was looking for other games I could play in the same genre. Turns out that outside of StarCraft 2, there are no recent games that are anywhere near as good. Wha…
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Technical Breakdown of a new NES game written in Lisp
What Remains is a narrative adventure game for the 8-bit NES video game console, and was released in March 2019 as a free ROM, playable in emulator. It was created by a small team, Iodine Dynamics, over the course of two years of on and off development. It’s currently in the hardware phase as a limited batch of…
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Origin Sells Out
One day in early June of 1992, a group of executives from Electronic Arts visited Origin Systems’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. If they had come from any other company, the rank and file at Origin might not have paid them much attention. As it was, though, the visit felt a bit like Saddam Hussein dropping in at…
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I Am the Cheapest Bastard in Indie Games
A Queen's Wish screenshot. Note that I use game art that I like to look at. This is necessary because I'll be staring at it for years, and...
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I Am the Cheapest Bastard in Indie Games
A Queen's Wish screenshot. Note that I use game art that I like to look at. This is necessary because I'll be staring at it for years, and...
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Gamedev Tutorial: Trigonometry Basics – Sine and Cosine
[latexpage] 本文之中文翻譯在此 Overview Trigonometry is a very essential building block to a huge portion of game math. That's why I've chosen this topic for the first tutorial of my new Gamedev Tutorials series. Having a solid understanding of basic of trigonometry can go a long way for game development. It is used…
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Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
We spent years working on this game. We're betting our family's future on it. So. Why does it look so bad? We've been writing indie game...
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Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker
I love everything about PICO-8. It's a fantasy gaming console that wants you - ...
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Nigerian Teens Are Making Sci-Fi Shorts with Slick Visual Effects
For the past year, a group of teens in Nigeria called the Critics Company have been uploading short sci-fi films to their YouTube channel. Using a smartphone wi
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Alone in the Dark
Most videogame stories are power fantasies. You spend your time getting ever stronger, ever tougher, ever more formidable as you accumulate experience points, gold, and equipment. Obstacles aren’t things to go around; they’re things you go through. If you can’t get past any given monster, the solution is to go kill…
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We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015)
The Commodore/Amiga honeymoon could hardly have been more idyllic. Honoring the wishes of everyone at Amiga to not get shipped off to Commodore’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Commodore instead moved them just ten miles from their cramped offices in Santa Clara, California, to a spacious new facility in…
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Writing a lunar lander game for an actual lunar lander
As it’s the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, I thought this would be a great opportunity to live code a demonstration of using my new compiler to write a simple lunar lander game… but first, I’m going to port the compiler to generate code for an actual lunar lander. Yes, my target platform is the…
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Dungeon Generation in Diablo 1
Diablo1 is a classic 1996 hack and slash rogue-like. several fans took it upon themselves to reverse-engineer the source code. I began a week long deep dive into how exactly did lead developer, Dav…
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The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
Get those numbers up! Those are rookie numbers! I've been reading a lot about Anthem. It's that gigantic, mega-budget looter-shooter fr...
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Zelda Screen Transitions Are Undefined Behaviour
The vertical scrolling effect in the original “The Legend of Zelda” relies on manipulating the NES graphics hardware in a manner that was likely unintended by its designers.
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Cities: Skylines Is Turing Complete
(Non-clickbait title: building a 4-bit adder in Cities:Skylines.)
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The Mortgaging of Sierra Online
The Sierra Online of the 1980s and very early 1990s excelled at customer relations perhaps more than anything else. Through the tours of their offices (which they offered to anyone who cared to make the trip to rural Oakhurst, California), the newsletter they published (which always opened with a folksy editorial from…
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Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU
How we got here After Apple released its (soon-to-be) previous generation Mac Pro, it probably didn't take long for them to realize they had a trash can…
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Writing a small ray tracer in Rust and Zig
This is where I write about the stuff that I've been working on.
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Atari Centipede’s Hidden Code Trap
During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games. This week, I tho…
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A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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Adventure Games and Eigenvalues (2017)
Do adventure games have dead ends? The author of The Teeny Tiny Mansion proves the absence of dead ends in that game via formal verification (in particular, with the help of the cbmc model-checking program ). Here I’ll demonstrate how to prove the same thing via Markov theory. The Markov approach requires more…
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Soviet Arcade Games from the 70s and 80s
I was thinking recently that here in the West we take our video game history largely for granted. Look back at the Golden Age of video games, and it’s apparent that we had it pretty good R…
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Procedural content generation: creating a universe (2015)
23114, 584, 46931, these three numbers were used to create the entire universe for Elite .
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Day of the Tentacle
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…