Game Dev Resources
As I am going about trying to learn a subject, I often bookmark links to videos and articles that I found very informative. I thought I would share a curated list of these links with you. I am actively making a game / game engine, so this is definitely a page that I will be updating often as I learn new solutions to the problems that I face while developing. If you have a link you think is worthy of being added to this page, email me at fyndor @ gmail dot com with the subject “Game Dev Resource Suggestion” and if it is as good as or better than similar content I have referenced or something I have not covered, I will happily add it.
Last Update: March 30, 2024
Systems and Mechanics
- Data-Oriented Design
- It can’t be understated how important this talk by Mike Acton is for all software developers. If you have not watched “the Mike Acton talk”, do yourself a favor, stop what you are doing, and watch this video. It will change how you develop software and architect performant systems.
- The right way to build quest systems
- Spacial hash grids
- Perfect crafting system
- Isometric 2D Coordinates
- Robust 3D collision system
- This one is special. Casey Muratori, developer of Handmade Hero, digusses how he implemented the movement system for The Witness. He goes in depth into the how the engine ensures that the player will never get stuck or get to places they are not supposed to be able to get to in 3D worlds. It is a system designed for performance, with the ability to resolve navigation at runtime without having to bake ahead of time. This allowed their level designers to get instant feedback about how their changes to the game affected navigation and is a very impressive presentation on how to implement movement in a complicated 3D environment. While I am at it, I’m just going to go ahead and link the playlists section of his YouTube channel. Tons of great stuff in there (Like the HandmadeCon talks!).
- Automated Testing and Instant Replays
AI
Animation
- An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation
- Good Design, Bad Design - Tetris, Hyper Light Drifter, and Great Game Animation
- Step by Step Procedural animation
Game Feel
- Why Your Death Animation Sucks
- Forgiveness mechanics
- Getting a juicy camera
- Building a better jump
- Juice it or Lose it
- The art of screenshake
- Fast and Funky 1D Nonlinear Transformations
- How Cameras in Side-Scrollers Work
- Recreating Super Mario’s Jump
- How I made 10 hours of Gameplay with 30 seconds of content
Level Design
- Level design of Celeste
- Ori and the Will of the Wisps design
- Applying 3D Level Design to 2D
- Moving Mountains: Speedy Level Creation as a Desperate Indie Dev
Geometry
Procedural Generation
- Noise-Based RNG
- Procedurally generating story and worlds
- Series on procedural world generation
- Cyclic Dungeon Generation with Joris Dormans
- While other talks go into how to shape procedurally generated dugeons, what Joris is describing is a method to make coherent dungeons that feel like they were designed by a human. It allows you to generate things like locks and keys, but really so much more. If your game involves procedural generation, you need to learn about what he is doing. This talk goes over the method and the game he built to while designing this method
- How Unexplored 2 Generates Entire Fantasy Worlds from Scratch with Joris Dormans
- After watching the previous video, this video will show you what Joris is doing these days with that same method, but using it to also build overworlds. If you think outside the box, you could take this same methodology to systems that have nothing to do with generating physical spaces. It is a really powerful concept and is worth your time to learn.
- Practical Procedural Generation for Everyone
- Procedurally generating 3D dungeons
- Tile-Based Map Generation using Wave Function Collapse in ‘Caves of Qud’
- Procedural Generation with Wave Function Collapse and Model Synthesis
- Optimizing procedurally generated terrain meshes
- Optimizing voxel game engine
- This video is can in some ways be thought of as a continuation of the previous video. This video will blow your mind when it comes to how optimized you can get if you really think about what the minimum amount of information required to render your scene is considering what ever constraints might be in place. Here, because of the engine he is optimizing is voxel based, he is able to make optimizations that get his scenes to 99.998% less storage and 370x better FPS. Even if you aren’t building a voxel-based game, this video has a lot of value helping you see what kind of optimizations you should be thinking about for your games.
- Experimental ventures into tile-based procedural generation - Beyond Townscapers
- Here is an article that seeks to mimic a similar grid technique to us as a tile base to build meshes upon like Townscapers does
- Procedural Map Generation Techniques with Herbert Wolverson
- These two talks are both with Henrik Kniberg of Mojang
Shaders
2D Pixel Art
- Choosing canvas size
- Designing side-scroller tileset
- 2D Physics
- Choosing a color palette
- Shading
- Auto mapping in Tiled
- Pixel art in Blender
2D Tile Tutorials
- Top down house
- Top down trees
- Top down character design and animation
- Top down grass
- Top down water
- Top down bush
2D Workflows
- The Animation Process Of Ori & The Blind Forest
- Uses 3D animation rig to render 2D animations that are impossible to animate to the same detail with pure 2D animations at the scale that game dev requires from a practical standpoint
2D Game Dev
3D Art
- Sculpting with Blender
- Series on how to create modular models for your levels
- 3D Artist’s Guide to Modular Environments