Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
Impact HTML5 Game Engine released
My HTML5 Game Engine Impact is now ready. It took some time, but I think it was worth it. I'm proud of what I have achieved and I hope you'll like it too.
What is ZIL anyway?
The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem. So I'm ...
24 Hours of Rust Game Development
In this post I'll talk about a small game I've been developing in about 24 hours in total (mostly in a few hour blocks during evenings or…
Celebrating the first NES Tetris game crash
Blue Scuti made history, breaking NES Tetris in a way that was previously only theoretical. Here is a glimpse into the what, who, and how.
The Origin Story of Kid Pix
The history of Kid Pix by Craig Hickman
A series of tricks and techniques I learned doing tiny GLSL demos
In the past two months or so, I spent some time making tiny GLSL demos. I wrote an article about the first one, Red Alp . There, I went into details about the whole process, so I recommend to check it out first if you're not familiar with the field.
Titled Tuesday Cheating
Fantastic Cheaters and Where to Find Them
Turbo Rascal Syntax Error
TRSE (or its full original name “Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN”) is a complete suite (IDE, compiler, programming language, resource editor) intended for developing games/demos for 8 / 16-bit line of computers, with a focus on the MOS 6502, the Motorola 68000, the (GB)Z80, the M6809 and the X86…
The Unbalanced Design of Super Smash Bros
Blog and Portfolio site for Forrest Smith, aka ForrestTheWoods
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
To the person who [is] contemplating buying this game, what would I say? I would say take your money and give it to the homeless, you’ll do more good. But if you are mad to buy this game, you’ll probably have a hell of a lot of fun playing it, it will probably make you uneasy, and you’ll probably be a smarter person…
How I make graphics for retro systems and retro-styled games
Game consoles, especially older ones, are defined more than anything by their graphics capability. The unique graphical limitations of a system can often mak...
John Carmack's First Game
A blog in which a dedicated addict plays through all PC computer role-playing games (CRPGs), in chronological order.
The Cargo Cult of Game Mechanics
On the existential crisis in gaming and the role of game design.
Overwatch Randomized Trial on Gender
A recurring discussion in Overwatch (as well as other online games) is whether or not women are treated differently from men. If you do a quick search, you can find hundreds of discussions about this, some of which have well over a thousand comments. These discussions tend to go the same way and involve the same…
Building a Web Game in C
Christmas is coming up. When I used to work at a bank the entire month of December and a bit of January we were placed under “Change Freeze”. We weren’t allowed to deploy updates to our applications during this period. The thinking was: A lot of people are away over Christmas Application changes can lead to crashes…
I spent way too much effort to win a game show on Dutch national TV
In my time, I've done a number of side projects — some serious, some decidedly less so. My latest side project is quite definitely in the latter category: trying to win a game show on national television.
Minimal Cross-Platform Graphics
Exploring how to use 2D graphics in various desktop operating systems, the old-school way. In this part we learn how to create an empty window under Linux, macOS and Windows.
Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
NOTE: This article has been superseded by my more recent one here
Laser Socks – a sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing
A sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing.
Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS
Solving AoC on the DS with Rust.
Omnimax
In a previous life, I worked for a location-based entertainment company, part of a huge team of people developing a location for Las Vegas, Nevada. It was COVID, a rough time for location-based anything, and things were delayed more than usual. Coworkers paid a lot of attention to another upcoming Las Vegas…
Clojure Plays Mario
Before getting too far into the weeds, let's begin with the results. Without too much effort, an AI was written in clojure that could complete all of the levels in the original Super Mario Bros for the NES except for the Bowser levels that have mazes. Namely, levels 4-4, 7-4, and 8-4 were not completed (more on this…
Duke Nukem 3D Code Review
Since I left my job at Amazon I have spent a lot of time reading great source code. Having exhausted the insanely good idSoftware pool , the next thing to read was one of the greatest game of all time : Duke Nukem 3D and the engine powering it named " Build ". It turned out to be a difficult experience: The engine…
Coding the anime "woosh" screen on Amiga
The Amiga was a spectacle of graphics and sound when it debuted in 1985. While it can trivially display colorful images like in the above example, doing so in the context of a game engine presents a lot of unique challenges.
Hexells – Self-Organising System of Cells Drawing Textures [WebGL]
is a Self-Organising System of cells, that was trained to build textures using neighbour communication only. This work exposes the relation between the life of an individual cell, and the cell collective as a whole.