Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,047 posts.
In March 2018, I had been a full-time indie game developer for four years. My heroes were Jonathan Blow, Lucas Pope, and Robyn and Rand Miller. I had 2,500 Twitter followers, an ambitious title under my belt with thousands of sales, and a free office in a hip coworking space near downtown Columbus, generously provided…
While grocery shopping this evening, I happened to notice a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese that was turned around, with a familiar looking maze on the back.
The Heroes of Might and Magic series of fantasy strategy games was an anomaly during its period of peak popularity at the turn of the millennium: it remained defiantly turn-based in an industry that had gone almost entirely real-time, and it likewise continued to rely on lovingly hand-drawn pixel art in lieu of trendy…
Here are three true statements about the game of Slay the Spire 2 (in single player): If you pick Neow's Bones in the Underdocks, the random curse is ~54% likely to be Debt.* It is impossible to receive Rebound from the Trash Heap event. Your first fight is 76% likely to drop a potion in Underdocks, and 4% likely to…
Using an odd floating point error to detect emulators
It is the moment you have all been waiting for!...ish. I am sticking one toe in the water and putting out a very, very unpolished release of the very first version of the engine (the isometric...
Recently, Valve announced that Counter-Strike 2 would no longer support macOS . As a one-man indie developer who has released a game supporting macOS , I find myself at first surprised at Valve’s decision. But after looking back at my own journey of supporting six platforms, I feel I can understand Valve’s perspective.
My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword] . No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.
Intro This post will cover challenges and aspects of production to consider when creating new rendering / graphics techniques and algorithms – especially in the context of applied research fo…
We've all been there: you learn a few things and it all seems so simple, but when it comes time to make something yourself, it doesn't look right! In this tutorial, we'll start with some "beginner's pixel art" and we'll make edits to it in order to show off some common mistakes and their solutions. One of the hardest…
The sad days of DOS. Any program could peek and poke the kernel, hook interrupts, write anywhere on disk. There was no safety.
Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details.
In Part 1, we used Dolphin’s debugger to find the location of Player 1’s score in RAM . In this article, our goal is to hack the score calculation routine so that the bonus goals do not award so many points.
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
Is the traditional 2D imaging model nearing the end of its usefulness, or does it have a shiny future in the “modern graphics” world? I spent a week on a research retreat in a cottage in the woods to answer this question, as it shapes the future of UI toolkits. Performant UI must use GPU effectively, and it’s…
Articles, projects, podcast by Ulysse Pence
Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code
in an era where tech giants increasingly control our digital experiences, the Steam Deck stands as a beacon of user freedom
How to create 2D visibility/shadow effects for your game.
Reverse engineering the traffic system from Pizza Tycoon (1994): how the original devs drove dozens of cars through a city with almost no CPU budget.
This post is part of My Career Series. 本文之中文翻譯在此 Now that Uncharted 4 is released, I am able to talk about what I worked on for the project. I mostly worked on AI for single-player buddies and multiplayer sidekicks, as well as some gameplay logic. I'm leaving out things that never went in to the
As I’m getting older I look back on all the things I’ve done as a creative developer, and I see so many cool projects! But I never wrote down any development
I think this is what scientists call "meatspace" pic.twitter.com/IX4TddIi0l
Released in 1983, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home console was a cheap, yet capable machine that went on to achieve tremendous success. Using a custom designed Picture Processing Unit (PPU) for graphics, the system could produce visuals that were quite impressive at the time, and still hold up fairly well…
