For many years I have wondered what is the best way to keep and organise useful information that I don’t want to lose. One category of such information is interesting game development resources that explain real-world techniques that your typical tutorials and documentation don’t cover.
Good information is hard to find, so I thought I would share the resources I have in an organised manner, in case it’s useful to anyone else. This is meant to be a living document that I will update as I find new resourecs, and of course feel free to suggest some 😊
Because there are already tons of lists related to game development, I will avoid basics here and focus on more specific or advanced topics. If you want a list of mainstream tools and engines, there are already tons out there. I am more interested in sharing resources that will make you go “oooo I never heard of that before”.
Articles and Papers
Tech Art
- Refracting Pixels by Froyok - An interesting article about how games render refractive surfaces. Her blog generally has a lot of tech art posts.
- Normal Mapping for a Triplanar Shader - A deep dive article into triplanar mapping and how to do it correctly. Triplanar mapping is often used in situations like terrain rendering, where UV mapping is difficult and to avoid ugly stretching or texture seams.
- Tech Animation on Wanderstop Part 2 - Tea Making - Have you ever spent time thinking about how to implement better feeling ladders in games? Aura had to because the ladder is a core element of the loop of making tea, and her article about it is interesting.
- Porting Bungie’s 3D Spasm Library to Three.js This one is just interesting. It explains the implementation of a pretty complex pipeline to load and display Destiny assets and data on the web.
- Siggraph 2014 - Creating Content to Drive Destiny’s Investment Game: One Solution to Rule Them All - A Siggraph presentation about how character customisation is implemented in Destiny. It goes into a lot of details on how the system works and how it was optimised for performance, scale, and for easy to use repeatable artist workflows.
- [Breakdown] Shadow of the Colossus (PAL - PS2) - This breakdown goes into a lot of details looking at how those impressive Colossi and environments were implemented at the time
- The Making of “Shadow of the Colossus” - An amazing PDF about the making of Shadow of the Colossus actually written by members of the team in 2005. This document is often hard to find and the previous link I had on it was link rotten. Probably worth archiving.
Networking / Multiplayer
- What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Game Networking - An article explaining the common methods multiplayer is implemented in games, going from peer to peer, client and server, and client prediction. This isn’t an implementation guide but more an introduction to the concepts.
Video
Tech Art
- Cross-hatching in games - an ancient technique reimagined by Gamelogic - A video about cross-hatching as an artistic technique, and how to implement it in a game engine.
- How scrolling textures gave Super Mario Galaxy 2 its charm - A short video looking at texture scrolling tricks used in a level of Super Mario Galaxy 2, involving clever use of displacement maps. A good source of inspiration for effects.
Physics
- “Slide Against Wall” collision detection formula A short video about a common way of dealing with sliding in collision detection.
