Covers grid, polygon, pixel based movement maps; jumping; animations; controls

Synchronous networking in Supreme Commander

Video showing NPC exploring randomly until it sees the player, then follows by line of sight, then follows by going to recent player locations

Covers state machines, menus, maps, combat

Someone looked at the “Procedural Modeling of Cities” paper that used L-systems, and found that it was much simpler to directly write the code than to try to make L-systems do what they wanted. Also see http://www.newton64.ca/blog/?p=747

Slides explaining how “dual numbers” work and how they can be used in games

Slide deck that goes through examples of how the GPU shader compilers won't give you the optimizations you might want, and how you should write your code to take advantage of things like multiply-add and reciprocal square root.

Nice video showing structural map generation using graph grammars, on a non-grid layout; see discussion at http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1bne5o/graph_grammar_and_voronoi_based_level_generation/

Alternative to flocking-based steering that (essentially) uses utility functions assigned to each potential direction of movement

Learn AI behavior trees by playing this game

Planet generator. Beautiful hexagon+pentagon planetary surface, with climate generation.

AMA from Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress)

Maxis engineer explains how SimCity 5's traffic simulation algorithm works

SimCity 5's "GlassBox" simulation engine lets them make new sim games and parts of sim games easily. Reddit post/discussion about it.

Algorithm for fractal city layout, creating boulevards and larger roads as needed

Implementing linear interpolation (lerp) by using fused multiply-add. Not for speed, but increased accuracy.

Uploaded by Don Hopkins; non-mobile URL is http://www.scribd.com/collections/4050497/The-Sims

Visualization of walkable areas in a game uncovered some bugs in the world representation

Royalty free music for commercial use (might be useful for indie game developers)

Blue noise is neat for being able to place objects in a reasonable layout; multi-class blue noise is placing multiple types of objects. This paper explores better ways of doing that.

"Back in 2010, Chris Hecker presented a talk about Intrinsic vs Extrinsic rewards, titled: Achievements Considered Harmful? You could say that this article is about our own, direct experience in the matter. It’s about how we nearly ruined our newest game by adding one of the most common game tropes: the quest system."

Procedurally generated "British Countryside" maps. Uses voronoi for and perlin noise. Generates agricultural areas, villages, cliffs, trails, walls, forests. Each region has its own algorithms for populating its contents.

Library for making roguelikes in Javascript: pathfinding, maze generation, dungeon generation, field of view, turn scheduling, square and hex grids, seedable random number generator

"OMPL, the Open Motion Planning Library, consists of many state-of-the-art sampling-based motion planning algorithms. OMPL itself does not contain any code related to, e.g., collision checking or visualization. This is a deliberate design choice, so that OMPL is not tied to a particular collision checker or visualization front end."

Procedural map generation using constraints

Explodomatica is free software for generating explosion sounds (e.g. for use in games)

Preloader for the Doomsday Console -- inject this into your script to debug any swf.

Heightmap terrain defined by kriging function instead of arrays or spline surfaces.

"Mobile browsers are basically still a huge mess, except for Safari on iOS, except when PhoneGap'd. So still pretty messy."

Tutorial for using Haxe to make an Android game

Using linked lists in Flash is sometimes faster than using arrays/vectors, probably because the linked lists are expanded to be statically typed, whereas arrays/vectors have some generics going on at runtime (not sure)

Deferred rendering uses a g-buffer to store normals in a texture. The straightforward approach of storing x,y,z in r,g,b isn't great; this page lists alternatives, including performance and accuracy.

"So I thought it would be a good idea to make a big list of AI interview questions ... some that I've asked, some that I've been asked, and others that I think are worth asking." - from Paul Tozour

Explanation and in-browser demo of metaball algorithms

"Have you ever had a memory instantiation problem that was impossible to track down? Here is a post that might help you with that kind of thing!

Beware! This post is very long… but VERY instructive! If you want to learn some internal mechanism of Flash, I strongly suggest you read it from top to bottom without skipping parts!:)"

Lighting for games like Minecraft

2d bin packing algorithms, useful in games (e.g. texture atlas creation)

"This article is a design article about implementing deferred rendering. The motive behind it is that while there have been many articles and presentations about the concepts behind deferred rendering (for example, the article about deferred rendering in Killzone 2), there is very little information about how to approach it from a design standpoint. This article aims to do just that. The article is accompanied by code that implements a deferred rendering framework, and is somewhat a development journal of that framework. "

Networking in Quake 3: delta compression, unreliable packet delivery, acknowledgement messages

How many users get hardware accelerated WebGL? Among Firefox users (~25%), it varies from 21% to 58% on Windows, 40% on Linux, and 80% on Mac. It's probably similar on Chrome, so my guess is that 20-30% of users overall (IE doesn't support WebGL) can use WebGL. I don't think WebGL has a software fallback (unlike Flash 11) but I'm not sure.

Flash 11 notes: (1) 50% of Flash 11 users have hardware acceleration turned on, (2) they're being very careful about turning on hardware acceleration on drivers they haven't tested or are flaky, (3) future releases will have hardware acceleration enabled on more hardware, (4) Flash 11.2 will auto update (finally)

List of game postmortems (game developers look back on their development process to see what went well and what didn't)

Revenue and sales numbers for hit games and average games on iOS

Game control handling -- movement, jumps, camera, etc. -- is often a place where the simplest approach isn't the best. This post describes some things that Wind-up Knight does.

Nicely rendered game maps for GTA:SA

Examples of how visualizations of internal game data can help the game development process.

A train set designer for for OpenTTD describes what goes into the design: players having interesting choices to make, length of wagons, cargo capacity, speed vs capacity, rail types, different time periods.

Developer blog of someone who's working on a Minecraft-like game, and is describing every step.

Spelunky's procedural generation of maps uses room patterns that are mostly set with some variables, and obstacles that are dynamically placed based on pattern matching.

"Slippery slope is usually a bad property in a game. If a game has a powerful slippery slope effect, that means that when one player gets a small early lead, he is more likely to get an even bigger lead, which in turn makes him more likely still to get yet an even bigger lead, and so on. In a game like this, the real victor of the game is decided early on, and the rest of the game is futile to play out (or to watch)."

"In videogames there are often times where you want an impact to feel harder than it really is. There are a lot of variables that can be used to achieve this. Obviously sound is really important as well as blood, screen shakes, controller shake, etc. One VERY important ingredient to this is the use of hit pause. "

Article explaining how to procedurally generate cavern structures like 2d maps in King Arthur's Gold / Terraria, or 3d maps in Infiniminer / Minecraft.

One game's approach to random numbers. Try to make the "random" numbers match the player's perceptions, not what's mathematically pure.

Tutorial for making an Angry Birds like game in Flash.

"Ren'Py is a visual novel engine that helps you use words, images, and sounds to tell stories with the computer. These can be both visual novels and life simulation games. The easy to learn script language allows you to efficiently write large visual novels, while its Python scripting is enough for complex simulation games."

Journey a player takes from learning about a game to being really engaged with it. MMO focused.

Another technique for making transition tile art for tile based games.

Blog post about death penalty in games, plus lots of discussion in the comments

"In other words, players will trade time for safety, but they risk undervaluing their own time to the point that they are undermining their own enjoyment of the game. A classic example is the skill system from Morrowind, which rewards players for repeating any activity. Running into a wall for hours increases the Athletics skill while jumping over and over again increases the Acrobatics skill. Many players couldn’t stop themselves from spending hours doing mindless activities for these cheap rewards."

Design docs, including file/memory formats, for Ultima 6.

Attrition in RPGs: in some games, your health and spells don't recover between battles, so you have to carefully plan.

"I’m reminded of just how much presentation gets in the way of features.  You lower the bar on presentation detail (and the requisite work needed to create it), and you can go for a larger scope. Like having ghosts of former characters appear to haunt your new character. Adding a new monster that only needs text and an existing ascii symbol is relatively simple. Once you start requiring new models, animations, sounds, AI, etc. – it becomes an issue.  All companies – big or little, mainstream or indie – have a limited amount of resources to throw into a game.  Devoting it to one area means less left over to put in another. And if you raise the bar of quality in one spot, it’ll make everything look more shabby by comparison unless you bring everything else to a consistent quality."

Does crafting in an MMO have to be fun by itself, or can it rely on the context, inputs, and outputs to make it interesting?

Simple shadows in 2d top-down games, along with some interactive demos.

"A common way to represent a polygon mesh is a shared list of vertices and a list of faces storing pointers for its vertices. This representation is both convenient and efficient for many purposes, however in some domains it proves ineffective." … the half-edge structure is very useful for polygon meshes.

Game design article: what kinds of actions do players perform, and how often do those actions occur?

"Game designers also need to communicate something effectively – a set of rules and mechanics that the player must learn and master. This education process is one of the biggest challenges game developers face, and many games with fun systems have failed simply because few players get past the learning curve. Many tools exist for solving this problem – well-paced tutorials, helpful tooltips, accessible UI – but perhaps the simplest approach is to activate one of the player’s pre-existing schemas that is well matched with the game’s underlying mechanics."

"Crazy Eddie's GUI System is a free library providing windowing and widgets for graphics APIs / engines where such functionality is not natively available, or severely lacking. The library is object orientated, written in C++, and targeted at games developers who should be spending their time creating great games, not building GUI sub-systems!"

Series of explanations about lag compensation in networked shooter/action games: backward reconciliation, prediction, extrapolation, etc.

Craig Stern made some sound effects and music for the TIGsource Assemblee competition. Some of these were used in Realm of the Mad God

Many game developers are dismissing story and focusing on gameplay, but story can add to the enjoyment of the game

"How do we make story a meaningful part of MMORPGs? A dynamic world is a necessity, of course, but with a dynamic world it’s easy for the state of the world to become difficult to figure out for even veteran players. There needs to be a way for players to easily grok the state of the game world in order to allow players to make intelligent decisions that will have meaningful effects on the world. We can do this by creating a robust system for aggregating in-game history. Let’s see what we need to make this happen."

Aliens and non-human species tend to be depicted as more homogenous than humans, often to the point of being illogical.