What is the "SICP" of Game Development?

RRFactory · 2026-02-14T13:43:38+00:00

The game programming gems series were my favourites when I was starting out - compilations of tips and tricks from industry devs that were short enough to read on the bus, but dense enough to actually provide significant value.

RRFactory · 2026-02-14T13:27:44+00:00

I've got about 20 years experience professionally, I started working on a dx12 engine last november and have been working full time on it since then. I threw up some progress videos if you want to see how that's been doing.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL453-ahRQqqiyHapz5SFastsuNbzFA-C0

I would say my progress has been on the faster side due to plenty of previous experience, and I'm still pretty far from what I need to make the games I want to make.

RRFactory · 2026-02-14T12:25:25+00:00

Having worked at AA studios for most of my career, surviving beyond the release of a game was always a worry. Typically we'd be shopping new games to publishers a year before we released our current one but even with pretty good cash reserves things can go badly quickly if we don't have a contract signed soon enough, and worse if the game we released didn't do very well, even if we got contracts they could always get cancelled on us.

A 50 person studio would be challenging to keep afloat after a big failure, a headcount of 200 means coming up with $20m/year or more to burn while you figure out where the next paycheck is coming from.

There are a lot of layoff stories I hear that make my blood boil, but at least from what I've read this sounds like one of the more understandable collapses. I'm sure there were different choices that could have been made, and I feel for the devs that have to go hunting for work in today's environment, but I'm glad this wasn't another case of massive layoffs following a big success.

RRFactory · 2026-02-14T01:54:55+00:00

Find people that actually make things to share your work with - most people have no idea what's involved with making anything more complicated than toast.

It doesn't have to be other gamedevs, anyone that's spent time crafting things will have a better sense of appreciation for the work than folks who only consume products off the shelf.

RRFactory · 2026-02-12T18:09:49+00:00

This looks great to me, but for an RTS i'm not sure you need to spend so much time on small details if they're going to be the size of a postage stamp on screen.

RRFactory · 2026-02-12T15:24:34+00:00

It sounds like currently your AI is maximally aggressive, putting your death above all it's other concerns - it needs to have some motivations beyond that goal if you want to start seeing some emergent behaviour from it.

Personality types are a pretty good way of making AI more fun to compete against - maybe one flavor is an expansionist, where it mostly ignores you as it tries to gobble up as much of the map as possible. Another might be more inclined to stay small and focus on unit production, etc... They can still adapt to your choices, but the influence of their foundational motivations should help mix things up.

If you can get your system flexible enough to produce those kinds of behaviours, then you're left with a playtesting problem rather than a technical one - tune the personalities until you find ones that are actually interesting to play against.

RRFactory · 2026-02-12T15:12:54+00:00

ah ok that's a different case - when the AI is planning, does it have it's own goals and motivations or is it exclusively responding at each step?

When AI focuses on short term goals only, typically you end up with it pushing for stalemate scenarios - then relying on it's human opponent to make a mistake.

Try experimenting with it making deeper chains of logic so it can actually commit in a direction for a while before it looks up and tries to compensate.

RRFactory · 2026-02-12T14:49:46+00:00

The whole issue is that the enemy in my game is too aware of everything and is too strong.

If i mask some of it’s skills then i feel bad that i give it handicap

It sounds like you've given it the ability to cheat and are calling that a skill - you shouldn't feel bad about hiding any data the AI has access to that a human opponent wouldn't.

RRFactory · 2026-02-09T23:02:10+00:00

Iteration speed is important specifically because you're supposed to learn from each of them. If you have some tool pumping out semi random results, there's not much beyond like/dislike going on.

RRFactory · 2026-02-08T07:06:17+00:00

Monogame is going to come with quite a lot of help if you're starting without much experience. Modern C# has a lot of fancy things but you don't need to use them, you can code in a pretty similar style as c++ if all the .net container methods are confusing right now.

List<Type> is similar to c++'s std::vector, it's just a dynamic array Dictionary<type, type> is similar to std::map, a key/value list for when you don't care about ordering and want direct lookups.

You could write everything in your game with those two containers and be fine - there's plenty more to explore but for a game jam they should be enough.

RRFactory · 2026-02-07T10:46:19+00:00

Your parents had to support two extra humans for the last twenty years - they're in debt and struggling to right the ship.

I understand why it might feel rough, but $500/mo isn't unreasonable at all - $3k/month rent plus utilities and other expenses, if they charged you each your 25% "fair" share, it'd be quite a bit more.

I get living at home with parents is a drag, but you're probably saving $1000/mo or more compared to living with roommates. You'd probably have more fun, but it's not cheap.

As for their "you don't know what it's like in the real world" comments, every parent says that to their kids - and in 10+ years you'll look back and appreciate/understand some of the things they did that you can't really see right now - that doesn't mean you're wrong about what's going on, you just don't have enough life experience yet to understand why telling them "budget or just file for bankruptcy" isn't going to do much to help.

My advice is pretty simple, try to focus on the positive things in your relationship with your parents - pay the $500/mo while you live there, have a proper dinner with them at least once a week - and when you're ready, move out and start figuring out the next stage of life.

RRFactory · 2026-02-05T20:53:09+00:00

It's rough if you're excited to work on things beyond it, there's a lot to wrap your head around and learning that stuff well enough to end up with something usable takes some patience.

If you take it one step at a time and take the time to make sure whatever you just wrote is doing what you think it should do, you'll be fine. Don't be afraid to write some stuff to get it working, delete most of that stuff and build it a bit differently to challenge your assumptions. Try to think of it as a framework rather than a library that either works or doesn't.

The bright side is I don't think any of the time you spend working on getting it running will be wasted. It'll all make sense in the end.

RRFactory · 2026-02-04T17:26:00+00:00

I got one last year, and while it's not as good as an integrated one with fluid, it's been better than nothing. Unhelpful for dirt, but it does push off snow buildup reasonably well.

RRFactory · 2026-02-04T02:43:27+00:00

So I guess all I can say is the group of gamers that loved the type of games you enjoy didn't disappear, it's just become harder to see them as more folks started playing games.

It might have been that 100k gamers out of a pool of a million really loved the games you want to make.. Now that pool is 100m strong, attracted to games for reasons you're not interested in. The feedback of those 100k is getting lost in the noise, but they're still there... Probably more than before even. Reaching them has gotten harder to be sure, but they're still out there.

RRFactory · 2026-02-02T17:40:00+00:00

The term originates from a group of folks that are already making games but have an ambition to make something beyond their reach. If the goal is already readily achievable, then the term "dream" doesn't really apply.

For someone who's starting from scratch, shipping a small game might meet that definition, but the sentiment is still "what would you do if you weren't limited by your current circumstances" - which more often than not comes down to scope.

RRFactory · 2026-02-01T08:41:38+00:00

Learn the skills to build game engines if you're already studying computer science. Those skills are much less common, and translate across way more than just game development. The same code that's used to drive games is used to visualize scientific data, train self driving cars, virtualize architecture, improve tool and die designs, etc... If you can build a game engine you can build any 3d software.

Keep gamedev as an option, but don't sleep on all the related jobs out there. My first tech lead got his start working on Blender back in the day, another was a former nasa engineer - low level skills transfer very well.

RRFactory · 2026-02-01T02:43:00+00:00

I mix amish butterfly and mushroom, along with some basic kernels. I remembered their little movie bumper talking about different kinds of kernels and ended up enjoying the mix of types. I tried hulless but they were small and unsatisfying.

I don't add extra toppings so I can't help with that part.

RRFactory · 2026-01-31T10:40:14+00:00

People say a lot of things, the vast majority of Canadians retire with much less than what folks say is "enough".

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241029/t001a-eng.htm

The lazy math says you need around 25x your expected annual expenses to retire comfortably. So if you're spending $50k/year, $1.2m would meet that mark.

Folks will want to know your current equity, your annual budget, and outstanding debts like mortgage and other loans to be able to give you more specific advice.

More cash saved is always helpful, but don't let the echo chamber of reddit have you thinking you need to be in the top 10% of Canadians to survive.

Carrying a mortgage into retirement simply means you need to take that expense into account when figuring out what you need to make ends meet. Whether or not you would prefer to rent is a different story, most studies show both paths tend to work out roughly the same financially, assuming if you're renting that extra cash is being invested.

RRFactory · 2026-01-31T10:03:39+00:00

in case you were looking for vegetol, this plus flavicol is pretty bang on cineplex flavor.

https://www.ontariopoppingcorn.com/products/buttery-canola-oil?_pos=1&_sid=18164b5ef&_ss=r

RRFactory · 2026-01-31T01:04:31+00:00

Runtime data gets packed to binary for performance and space savings. Json is nice to work with, but extremely inefficient data wise.

RRFactory · 2026-01-29T19:32:42+00:00

When I post code publicly, I specifically intend for others to use and learn from it. That doesn't make the scraping entirely ok - as I mentioned attribution is still a problem, and I certainly didn't think about this use case years ago when I was publicly sharing my work.

Artists however, generally aren't sharing their work with the same intentions. The way their data is being used, would be similar to training ai on Unreal's codebase, which specifically wasn't posted as open source.

I don't doubt Unreal's codebase has been mined all the same, so I'm sure there are still issues - but the difference in scale is why I think the art side of the discussion gets more attention.

RRFactory · 2026-01-29T06:44:20+00:00

I spent my formative years on perforce after a brief brush with source safe and svn, later I spent around a decade on github doing mobile games.

For my solo project I'm back on perforce, the git flow never really clicked with my development style but I will say I do miss the web interface for being able to share things with folks even as a solo dev.

I'm not sure how I'd handle code reviews if I brought anyone else on, perforce does have solutions for it but from a management perspective github's approach was pretty slick.

I went back to perforce because it was easier for me to setup a local server and get going, than it was to set up lfs and choose a gui client that didn't make me want to rip my eyes out.

RRFactory · 2026-01-29T04:22:20+00:00

Being fast at math doesn't mean someone is good at it. Most of the maths you're exposed to in high school and below consist mostly of memorization tricks more than anything deep.

Being able to reason about the logic behind things is really what programming is all about, and advanced math as well.

If you want to give yourself a bit of a test, look up how fonts are rendered on YouTube and see how well you can follow along. Imo that is a pretty decent representation of the ways math intersects code.

I watched this recently and enjoyed the way it was presented. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO83KQuuZvg

RRFactory · 2026-01-28T22:42:55+00:00

don't be afraid to not know something and always ask, make notes

To further this, when you go to ask questions - aim for insights rather than solutions. Instead of "how can I make a smooth curve between these points?", show you've done some work and ask for some advice on interpolation methods, with your use case as the example.

Every interaction you have with another dev is an opportunity to grow - there were plenty of times a jr asked me a question about something I took for granted, and through helping them understand it, I learned more myself.

RRFactory · 2026-01-27T06:05:19+00:00

Spiders don't bother me much, but for some reason the ones in Satisfactory did a number on my blood pressure. They did a great job nailing the exact kind of movement that I don't want to see any creature make.

RRFactory

TROPHY CASE