1051
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,047 posts.
1052
Why everything is becoming a game
All the better to control you
1053
Disassembling Jak and Daxter
I don't work at Naughty Dog, and I don't have any secret knowledge of Jak & Daxter, except what I figured out myself from the disc. So a lot of this may well be wrong. Take a pinch of salt with it.
1054
Resurrecting Crimsonland – Decompiling and preserving a cult 2003 classic game
Recovering and preserving Crimsonland, the 2003 top-down shooter, through reverse engineering of its original binary.
1055
How to explain your game to an asshole
Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint , Heat Signature , and Tactical Breach Wizards . Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
1056
Using an Amiga in 2021: Making an intro
Every once in a while, someone asks about my interests. I usually just say I'm into home computers from the 1980s and, since most people are very nice and polite, they then ask what I do with them. I usually say something about competing in computer graphics at "digital art festivals," because explaining what the…
1057
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…
1058
Reverse engineering Animal Crossing's developer mode
Last summer I began reverse engineering Animal Crossing for the GameCube to explore the possibility of creating mods for the game. I also wanted to document the process to create tutorials for people interested in ROM hacking and reverse engineering. In this post I explore the developer debugging features that are…
1059
Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
Sony would like you to know that any reasonable gamer would know that purchasing a game is just licensing a game (Video Games Chronicle), not owning it. And there is truth mixed in with a bold-face…
1060
Compressing chess moves for fun and profit
UPDATE: I’ve written a new post with a new technique which is about 2.5x more efficient than this approach Chess notation has come a long way since descriptive notation, now we have nice and decipherable Standard Algebraic Notation, like Qxf7 (queen takes on f7) or Nf3 (knight takes on f3). This is a great text…
1061
1062
How to Make Your Own Spooky Magic Eye Pictures (Autostereograms)
The simple standalone C++ code that goes with this post and makes autostereograms, can be found at The 1990s! They felt like a wasteland of culture at the time, but looking back, there was hyper co…
1063
1064
Writing space invaders with Go
The earliest memory I had of arcade video games was watching my older brother and cousins going at the video game machines at Genting Highlands. While our parents were at the other types of games Genting Highlands was more popularly known for, we were generally let loose to play arcade games to our hearts' content…
1065
Writing a Game Boy Advance Game
I spent a lot of time as a kid playing (generally, pretty terrible) games on my Game Boy. Having never written code for anything other than 'regular' general purpose computers before, I've been wondering recently: how easy is it to write a Game Boy (Advance) game?
1066
Pokedex.org: a progressive webapp for Pokémon fans
Blog by Nolan Lawson about JavaScript on mobile devices
1067
Airmash – a game that refused to die
The game Airmash was announced on Dec 10 2017 on Hacker News by a user named fivesigma. The game became very succesful in the year to come. But it would have a very rocky history.
1068
Graphics Programming Weekly
3D Programmer
1069
Blurred rounded rectangles
Blog of Raph Levien.
1070
GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode
Edit: Woah, this took off! If you want more details you can subscribe at the bottom of the post or on YouTube. I’m working on a more detailed highlights/commentary post and video. Previously: We got Claude Code playing Factorio, Towards beating Factorio autonomously, and Faketorio: an agent testbed I got GPT-5.6 Sol…
1071
Why Is 1 World Trade Center Missing from Spider-Man?
Like many people across the world, I’m using my quarantine effectively: by catching up on all the video games I wasn’t able to play while traveling. The game at the top of my list? Spider-Man, which was widely recognized as one of the top games of 2018. The game is features an open-world, which means you can travel…
1072
Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles
Exploring cyberspace with a thumbstick.
1073
Cakelisp: A Programming Language for Games
Update: See the Hacker News thread , /r/programming , /r/ProgrammingLanguages , /r/gamedev , and /r/lisp posts for discussions on this article and Cakelisp.
1074
Fitting Cubic Bézier Curves
Blog of Raph Levien.
1075
Gamedev in Lisp. Part 1: ECS and Metalinguistic Abstraction
In this series of tutorials, we will delve into creating simple 2D games in Common Lisp. The result of the first part will be a development environment setup and a basic simulation displaying a 2D sce...
1076
1077
The Family Bass - Music with an NES
I connected a Family BASIC keyboard to an NES via a bespoke adapter in order to play its unique triangle waveform live.
1078
How Doom didn't kill the Amiga
A scene from the Amiga game Defender of the Crown, released in 1986. For years, no other home computer came close to screens like these.
1079
How to engineer an AI harness for game development
Exploring practical ways to make your game more legible to AI agents and how to make agentic iteration faster.
1080
Betrayal at Krondor
During the 1960s and 1970s, a new type of game began to appear in increasing numbers on American tabletops: the experiential game . These differed from the purely abstract board and card games of yore in that they purported to simulate a virtual world of sorts which lived behind their surface systems. The paradigm…