This week
- I’ve been on a posting spree recently and I’m excited to get out some of these links I’ve been sitting on for a bit. Lots of fun ones here—enjoy! Print Gallery of an Artist A little platforming game that takes place inside recursive spaces. As a player, I found it beautiful,...
about 2 months ago
- June 1, 2026 The art and engineering of Silpheed The 90's was a decade of considerable improvement in the world of video-game consoles[1]. Each new model brought advanced processing power and better graphics without compromise. The mid-90s emergence of CD-ROM drives however was...
- June 1, 2026 The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed The 90's was a decade of considerable improvement in the world of video-game consoles[1]. Each new model brought advanced processing power and better graphics without compromise. The mid-90s emergence of CD-ROM drives...
2 months ago
- Bipedal vs quadrupedal: how many legs This is about the number of legs the creature walks on. Bipedal. Two legs. Humans, ostriches, T-rex, kangaroos, most fantasy humanoids. Quadrupedal. Four legs. Do...
- Intro You hear "lerp" and "smoothstep" everywhere in game dev. They sound like math jargon. They're not. Both are small tools that do the same job: smoothly move from one value to another. The problem...
- What is Kinematics Kinematics is the math field. It's the study of how things move without worrying about forces (which would be dynamics). FK and IK are the two branches: forward kinematics and inver...
- Intro Textures are usually the biggest cost in a 3D scene. Memory, bandwidth, and load time all get eaten by them. Resizing them is the obvious lever. There's more. This post is about the less obvious...
- The problem: collision is everywhere in games Every game has to answer one question over and over: did this thing touch that thing? Did the bullet hit the enemy? Did the player land on the platform? D...
- Intro Think back to the last game you played that felt good. What happened when you jumped? Did the camera move a little? Did your character squish for a moment before launching? What happened when yo...
3 months ago
- Intro You built a game on the web. It runs at 60 fps on your laptop. You open it on your phone and it stutters, overheats, or just crashes. Same code, same scene, completely different result. This pos...
- What a decal is A decal is a flat texture stuck onto an existing 3D surface. It doesn't add new geometry. It just paints something on top of what's already there. Bullet hole on a concrete wall? Decal...
- 1. The Core Insight: 2D Is 3D With a Flat Camera A modern 2D game is rendered by a 3D engine. Every sprite is a flat rectangle (a quad) in 3D space. Every tile is a quad. Every UI element is a quad. T...
- 1. Sprite A 2D image with transparency, drawn in the world with a transform. A sprite is the atomic unit of 2D games. The image data is just a PNG. What makes it a sprite is how it's used: positioned...
- Introduction You know what a 3D mesh is. You know what a skeleton is. There is a thing in the middle that connects them. That thing is skinning. And it makes or breaks how a character looks when it mo...
- Introduction A while ago I started wondering how games make sound feel like it's coming from a real place. Like in Counter-Strike when you can hear someone walking through a room two corridors over, o...
- What's a voxel? A voxel is to 3D what a pixel is to 2D. A pixel is a tiny square in a 2D image. A grid of pixels makes a picture. Your screen is a grid of pixels. Zoom into any photo and you see them....
- Introduction I hit an error like this: KTX2 texture decoded to 512x286, which is incompatible with block size 4x4 I assumed the texture needed to be square (width = height). That was wrong. Where the...
- Introduction This guide assumes you know nothing. We're starting from the actual beginning. By the end, you'll understand what trig is, why it matters for games, and you'll know the handful of formula...
- First, what problem are we even solving? Before we talk about SDFs, let's talk about how 3D graphics normally work. Take a round ball in any video game. Looks smooth, right? It's not. If you zoom in c...
- What is a skinned mesh? A mesh is the surface of a 3D object. Made of tiny triangles. A static mesh is something that never moves. A rock. A wall. A tree. A skinned mesh is a mesh with a skeleton insi...
4 months ago
- My 8-year-old vibe-coded a video game called “Play With Michael McDonald”, and she wanted to present it. So here’s Ella! The origin story After playing some Mario Party minigames the other evening, my 8-year-old daughter said, I wanna make a […]...
5 months ago
- Feb 14, 2026 How Michael Abrash doubled Quake framerate With the 1999 release of the Quake source code, came a readme.txt written by John Carmack. There is a particular sentence in that text that piqued my curiosity. Masm is also required to build the assembly language files. It...
- Feb 5, 2026 Let's compile Quake like it's 1997! The first batches of Quake executables, quake.exe and vquake.exe were programmed on HP 712-60 running NeXT and cross-compiled with DJGPP running on a DEC Alpha server 2100A. In June of 1996, having shipped their title but concerned...
6 months ago
- Jan 16, 2026 Is QSpy still cool? Let's play QuakeWorld! With the Internet being grossly expensive in France until 1999, I never got a chance to experience Quakeworld. Don't feel bad, I came back with great vengeance when it came to trading on Diablo II to become a SOJilionaire....
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