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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 211 posts.
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CSS Minecraft
A Minecraft clone made with pure HTML & CSS – no JavaScript.
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Making Minecraft Spherical
Discover the unique design challenges of creating a spherical planet out of Minecraft-like blocks.
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I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory
Picture Tom Nook greeting you with a sentence nobody at Nintendo wrote. That is what “animal crossing llm” usually points to: an experimental fan…
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No Graphics API
A deep dive into graphics APIs, shader languages and GPU architecture, exploring a simpler design for modern hardware. By Sebastian Aaltonen.
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Why fastDOOM is fast
During the winter of 2024, I restored an IBM PS/1 486-DX2 66Mhz, "Mini-Tower", model 2168. It was the computer I always wanted as a teenager but could never afford. Words cannot do justice to the joy I felt while working on this machine.
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Valve is about to win the console generation
Valve does nothing and still wins
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The Most Mario Colors
The Mario franchise has two distinct logo styles. The first began with the Mario Bros. arcade game and is mostly used for side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. games, though not all of those games use that style. The second is a multicolor polygonal style, and though it’s primarily used for 3D Mario adventures now, it was…
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Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
Thoughts, tools, and libraries I use to make games
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Learning music with Strudel
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Game design is simple
So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design.
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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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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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Half-Life
Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite…
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Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat
Interested in Anti-Cheat analysis? I highly recommend checking out Guided Hacking’s Anti-Cheat section. I’ve been reversing Black Ops Cold War for a while now, and I’ve finally decided to share my research regarding the user-mode anti-cheat inside the game. It’s not my intention to shame or promote cheating/bypassing…
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How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack
Released in June 1996, Quake had to ride three technological shock-waves during its lifetime. Besides the emergence of 3D hardware accelerator cards and the growth of the Internet, an operating system shift put game developers in a tough position.
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Programming SDF animations of Rick and Morty
An interactive guide on making animations on the GPU
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Solitaire
I have cited a few games as inspiration for Balatro in the past, but I wanted to talk about one in particular that hasn’t been mentioned much that arguably is the most important. I think if I had some kind of Balatro vision board, solitaire (Klondike) would be right in the middle of it with a big r
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Dithering – Part 1
Understanding how dithering works, visually.
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The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience. For mov...
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Blurry rendering of games on Mac
ProblemSolutionAffected GamesWhat Apple could do Problem I’ve submitted the issue described in this post to Apple as FB13375033. This issue has been open since September of 2023. If you game …
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O3 beats a master-level GeoGuessr player, even with fake EXIF data
In Which I Try to Maintain Human Supremacy for a Bit Longer
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Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game
an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other
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I designed my own fast game streaming video codec – PyroWave
Streaming gameplay from one machine to another over a network is a reasonably popular use case these days. These use cases demand very, very low latency. Every millisecond counts here. We need to:
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DOOMscrolling: The Game
Can a game work where all you do is scroll?
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Rendering Crispy Text on the GPU
Rubén Osorio’s blog
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More than you wanted to know about how Game Boy cartridges work
I set out a while ago to make a Game Boy cartridge from scratch. This is not a novel goal; bootleg Game Boy cartridges have existed almost as long as the Game Boy itself has, and there are many third-party cartridges now available for purchase , or that have copyleft designs .