Game Development Resources
In December of 2018 I decided to begin learning game development, one of the last "normal" areas of software development that I've not worked with.
As I began working through a fantastic Unity course on Udemy, I began visiting websites and Subreddits I'd never been to, and collecting links which contained valuable information. I've not had the time to read through all of these yet, but hopefully each can bring some value!
I will be maintaining and sharing that list here, in the hopes that it may bring value to another other fresh developers.
Genre-Specific ⤒
The Development board of a forum dedicated to SHMUP (Shoot em up) style games, one of my favorite genres.
An article breaking down 7 roguelikes that a game developer should consider studying.
A slightly silly article on why you should not try to make an MMORPG.
A thread discussing what goes into making a great SHMUP.
Daily Websites ⤒
All kinds of news about the professional game industry.
Indie game news.
Development retrospectives, probably other stuff.
A multi-Subreddit for various game dev related Subreddits.
The personal website of Fabien Sanglard, who writes all about his deep technical dives into the source code of games like Doom.
Mathematics & Physics ⤒
numberphile is supposed to be a great YouTuber for learning various math topics.
Relevant to this list, I've read that the video on quaternions is great.
Mathologer, another YouTuber that I've seen mentioned on Reddit, people seemed to react very positively to their videos.
A primer on trigonometry for game development.
All about rigid body physics.
Art & Design ⤒
A timelapse video in which someone makes 2D prototype assets.
This is a really neat Twitter account that posts a daily topic that followers create a pixel art piece for.
Very inspiring to see a spectrum of skills and interpretations.
A Reddit user's one year progress made while learning pixel art.
Pixel art tutorials.
A Patreon user who makes a ton of simple and amazing pixel art mini-tutorials.
An article on the art of Rogue Legacy.
A video showing the iterations made while creating a pixel art village.
Assets ⤒
All kinds of free assets, from sound to graphics.
I'm not sure who Kenny is, but he has a ton of great free stuff on his site, which we used in the Unity 2D course to prototype.
All kinds of fonts, to use especially with TextMesh Pro in Unity.
Code & Architecture ⤒
Some discussion on the merits of using traditional enterprise architecture techniques in a game's code base.
How to handle multiple aspect ratios in your game.
InControl, a Unity component that's supposed to be the best for managing user input.
A Unity package that seems to be highly recommended for localization.
An article discussing using pseudorandom numbers in games.
Think things like Minecraft seeds, and so on.
Tutorials & Source Code ⤒
Handmade Hero is "an ongoing project to create a complete, professional-quality game accompanied by videos that explain every single line of its source code."
This seems interesting due to the nature of it being the entire source for a completed game.
Build Dangerous Dave from scratch.
While I've never played Dangerous Dave, I've read about it, and John Romero, in the fantastic book Masters of Doom.
A YouTuber called Brackeys, supposed to be have a bunch of great tutorial videos.
Official tutorials from Unity.
Source code for a 2D shooter.
A page that has the giant design document used for Dirty Bomb.
The source code for the 1999 PC version of Monopoly.
This is the source code for the legendary Prince of Persia, for the Apple ][.
Post-Mortems & Documentaries ⤒
A mini documentary made by the developers of a game called Witch.
A video on developing Rogue Legacy on a budget.
The YouTube channel for the company that made Crawl, has some videos about developing the game.
An article breaking down the fantastic way that Rogue Legacy handles tutorials.
All about the making of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
A post-mortem on Bejeweled, a mobile games I played so much of back in the day.
Breaking down the Grand Theft Auto V rendering pipeline.
Breaking down the Rise of the Tomb Raider rendering pipeline.
A solo developer breaking down his 2018 year.
Interviews & AMAs ⤒
An interview with the developers of Rogue Legacy.
Another interview with the Rogue Legacy devs.
An interview with the developers of Enter the Gungeon.
A Reddit AMA with Concerned Ape / Eric Barone, the sole developer of Stardew Valley.
Another Stardew Valley AMA.
An AMA with the developers of Steredenn, a roguelike SHMUP.
An interview with the developer of Sausage Sports Club.
An AMA with the solo developer of Octahedron.
Aspects of Game Design ⤒
Discussion on what makes for a good bullet hell pattern.
Other Articles & Papers ⤒
A paper title "MAKU: A Code Generator for Bullet Hell Games".
While bullet hell is not my favorite SHMUP sub-genre, this could be an interesting read.
A writeup by a student dev that exhibited his game at MagFest (which is an amazing conference that I highly recommend).
The Wikipedia article on Simplex Noise.
The Wikipedia article on Perlin Noise.
An article discussing 2 years of demographic gathering for a game called Gremlins, Inc.
