Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 217 posts.

Games & Graphics
189

The Dig

As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…

199

The Story of Playdate

I recently posted the sixth episode of the Panic Podcast — a wide-ranging look into the creation of Playdate , our upcoming hand held video game system, based on over nine hours of conversation. It’s a really special listen. But I’m told not everybody listens to podcasts (outrageous), so I’ve made it a (long) blog…

204

Instanced Line Rendering Using WebGL

Native line rendering in WebGL leaves a lot to be desired. There's inconsistency in the implementation, so you can't trust that the line width you want will be available to you, for example. It's also missing some pretty important features, like line joins and caps. For these reasons, quite a bit of work has been done…