A collection of blogs and spotlighted insights from the industry.
The hardest part of autobattlers: turning stats into deployment changes. Ridiculous Space Battles now has a toggleable overlay when retrying -- your previous fleet shown with per-squadron survival rates, click any squad for full offensive/defensive stats. Saved to disk.
Metal doesn't support resource casting, so writing BC7 blocks from compute requires a temp buffer + blit. Workaround: alias a buffer and compressed texture on the same Metal heap allocation, then write blocks in the GPU's native X-first Morton swizzle order. ~20% faster on M4.
Capcom's PRAGMATA on RE Engine: Z-prepass, deferred G-buffer with visibility buffer, compute SSAO, ray-traced reflections, strand-based hair simulated in compute, full post stack (FXAA+TAA, motion blur, DOF, AMD CAS, LUT) -- all walked through pass by pass.
SH functions appear constantly in graphics papers and code. Understanding them need not be intimidating -- any function on the sphere (like a lighting environment) approximates well with just 9 coefficients (L=2). Covers projection, reconstruction, zonal harmonics, and rotation, with live JS demos.
PUC Lua is slow; LuaJIT is fast but stuck at Lua 5.1 (13 years ago). yk meta-traces C interpreters to auto-derive a JIT compiler -- ~400 LoC added to PUC Lua gets ~2x typical speedup, up to ~4x on some benchmarks. yklua tracks modern Lua; LuaJIT can't. MicroPython next.
Developer Preview is closed -- 40K of 800K devs keep access; full launch April 28 for $20. UI batching: Discover page drops from 1080+ draw calls to 5, up to 54% more FPS. SSAO now uses Hilbert Tree sampling + Float16. NavMesh on-demand tile generation for open-world games.
150+ light cookie/mask textures (CC0) released for all game engines. Recording studio set up to start producing foley packs (cards & dice first). Made a full game in s&box in an afternoon, launching April 28. Input Prompts update with VR and Steam hardware support coming soon.
The first-ever Handmade Network Expo, June 6 in Vancouver BC: an in-person celebration of software made from scratch. Lineup includes a new game, a time travel debugger for macOS, a custom metaprogramming language + IDE, and a custom game engine.
Capcom's Pragmata stacks real-time Snake-style hacking on top of third-person shooting -- players effectively control two characters simultaneously. The team's main design challenge: ensuring players never feel like they're 'repeating themselves' as the hacking keeps evolving.
Gameplay loops are a historical relic: board games needed replayability, arcades needed quarters. Modern games don't. Starting from mechanics and grafting meaning in later leads to hollow, unfinished games. What if you started from meaning and built the action around it?