Sandspiel is a falling sand game I built in late 2018. I really enjoyed writing this game, and wanted to put into writing some of my goals, design decisions, and learnings from that process. If you’re reading this but haven’t played sandspiel, you should probably go try it !
I replayed Warcraft III recently and was looking for other games I could play in the same genre. Turns out that outside of StarCraft 2, there are no recent games that are anywhere near as good. Wha…
As it’s the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, I thought this would be a great opportunity to live code a demonstration of using my new compiler to write a simple lunar lander game… but first, I’m going to port the compiler to generate code for an actual lunar lander. Yes, my target platform is the…
There's nothing here. The Internet is far too dangerous right now. The blog may return in future, if I get around to it.
A little while ago I was doing some research into the state-of-the-art for approximating subsurface scattering effects in real-time (mainly for skin rendering), and I had taken a bunch of loose notes to help me keep all of the details straight. I thought it might be useful to turn those notes into a full blog post, in…
Adrian Kummerländer's blog on software development, linux and open source
23114, 584, 46931, these three numbers were used to create the entire universe for Elite .
An overview of ray tracing denoising, reviewing filtering, spatiotemporal, sampling and AI techniques to improve convergence and temporal coherency in real time ray traced applications.
I wrote earlier about a neural net-powered dungeon crawling text adventure game called GPT-2-Adventure in which gameplay is incoherent and dreamlike, as you encounter slippery sign text, circular passages, and unexpected lozenge rooms. A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling…
Realtime rendering and videogame programming mostly, but I love computer science and visuals in all their forms. This is a notepad of my ideas.
I love everything about PICO-8. It's a fantasy gaming console that wants you - ...
Depth of Field from random sampling
A Queen's Wish screenshot. Note that I use game art that I like to look at. This is necessary because I'll be staring at it for years, and...
Do adventure games have dead ends? The author of The Teeny Tiny Mansion proves the absence of dead ends in that game via formal verification (in particular, with the help of the cbmc model-checking program ). Here I’ll demonstrate how to prove the same thing via Markov theory. The Markov approach requires more…
Oldschool planar graphics If you ever work with old hardware, like writing an NES emulator or reverse engineering an old Amiga game, you ...
First part of this series | Previous | Next |Index In the latter part of the last episode, I outlined two problems I want to solve next. The first is to weigh in the direction of my target when fin…
During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games. This week, I tho…
I rarely play or even see current games; the demands of this historical project of mine simply don’t allow for it. Thankfully, though, being a virtual time traveler does have its advantages. Just when I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself, having heard about some cool new release I just don’t have time for, I…
I’ve been playing a lot of Enter The Gungeon recently. It’s a great, brutally hard, twin stick bullet hell that reminded me a lot of Binding of Isaac. But as I’ve been playing it …
One day in early June of 1992, a group of executives from Electronic Arts visited Origin Systems’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. If they had come from any other company, the rank and file at Origin might not have paid them much attention. As it was, though, the visit felt a bit like Saddam Hussein dropping in at…
Yesterday, me, Dmitry, Wolthera and Agata visited BlenderCon 2019 . Intel had asked us to come to the conference to help set up the Intel/Acer booth, which was showing off Krita in all its HDR glory . After all, it’s pretty cool when a free software project has a real, tangible, technical, artistic first ! It was…
People can tell you how many levels, what patterns to follow to beat the levels and how to get a “perfect game”. But until now, no one’s ever told you how people really played the…
"Rule the Waves" is hard to buy, hard to look at, and hard to play. But you should play it anyway, because the actual game is so good it's worth it
