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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.

Any year
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…

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…

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?

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…

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…