Pessimistic, realistic, down to earth ripping apart of the game development industry as a career. If this turns you off of programming games, then you don’t have what it takes.

Starting Games Programming

A couple resources to get you started into games programming as a career or just for fun.

Industry
Allen Chou – Naughty Dogs

A programmer’s story about his path to success: how he managed to land a job at Naughty Dogs.

How to become a graphics programmer in the games industry

A list of things to know to become a graphics programmer for games.

Why I’ve said goodbye to mobile in favor of PC

One man’s journey and decisions on the mobile vs. PC debate.

Game Loop

deWiTTERS game loop

A great explanation of the different kinds of gameloops, and why each one works/doesn’t work

Input Handling

Technical: Input System Architecture/

An input handling system that can handle whatever you throw at it, gracefully

2D Programming

Guide to implementing 2d platformers

A very comprehensive guide to putting together a 2d platformer

Futile

An open source code-centric 2d Framework for game development.

Projectiles in 2d

Going over the basics of an Angry Birds-style projectile system, specifically in unity but the code is easily transferable

Procedural Level Generation for 2d Platformers

Great, accessible article on procedurally generating 2d platformer levels. More theory than fully fledged code, but lots of pictures and example code.

3D Programming

Ten things to achieve when starting 3d programming

Introduction to 3d Graphics Theory

Overview of the concepts involved in 3d graphic theory

3d Basic Lessons

Collection of about 20 lessons to begin 3d graphics programming

What to consider when deciding 2d vs 3d
Another 2d vs. 3d discussion

Discussion on 2d vs. 3d for games

Graphics

Introduction to SpriteSheets

Intro to spritesheets (used for 2d graphics/animation)

OpenGL Shader Resources Roundup

List of a bunch of OpenGL shaders.

Flat Shaded 3d in Unity

An alternative graphical style to retro pixel art for indie game developers.

A history of OpenGL

Awesome stack exchange post on the history of the feud between OpenGL and DirectX

OpenGL 3 & DirectX 11: The War Is Over

Great article, really explains the current situation for graphics

Rate My API

Goes through a list of popular graphics APIs and compares them.

Low Poly Characters

Creating a low poly ninja character with Blender

Pixel Shaders: An Interactive Intro to Shaders

A really cool interactive example of what pixel shaders are, allowing you to play around with your webcam and even create your own pixel shaders and view them realtime.

Terrain, Noise & Maps

DwarfCorp: Landmarks

A developer blog about using noise to generate landmarks & terrain

The Witness: Mapping Walkable Surfaces

Indepth blog post on mapping walkable surfaces in a game. Very well written and uses lots of images to illustrate points

Video / Discussion on Voronoi-based level generation

Cool technique for level generation (discussion + video to demonstrate)

Non-Artist Tutorials: 3d spaces in Blender

How to for people who suck at making graphical things (me!).

Perlin Noise: Talk 1

Great talk by Ken Perlin himself on the creation of Perlin Noise.

Physics

Sonic Physics Guide

Guide detailing the physics algorithms used in the game Sonic

Mario Jump

How to achieve the “Mario Jump”, where the time the player holds the jump key affects the height of the jump

Cloth Simulation

An incredibly indepth article on real time cloth simulation using B-spline surfaces. Lots of math, lots of code!

Collision Detection

Advanced Collision Detection

An overview of a bunch of collision detection techniques that could be chosen depending on what was necessary for the game

NeHe: Collision Detection

Very indepth collision detection guide, includes lots of code and images

Point in Poly test

Explanation of a quick algorithm for finding out whether a point is in a polygon

3DK : Collision Detection

Line Box Intersection, Feet to Terrain collision detection, and Bounding Boxes tutorials

Introduction to octrees

Intro to octrees, a common 3d collision detection technique to reduce processing time & power required for complex collision detection

RPG Games
HUD Cooldown Bars

Guide on programming Cooldown Bars

Monster Loot drops

Guide on programming random monster loot drops in an RPG

Multiplayer Games

Entity Systems

A new way of programming games that does away with OOP and could provide some serious benefits: provided we can get away from our object oriented mindset.

3d Game Synchronization

A guide with a downloadable working example that demonstrates game synchronization over the web using javascript and LightStreamer. Very indepth and informative.

Building an MMO’s multiplayer

A very well written and simple guide that goes over how the author wrote a 3d multiplayer MMO game and put it up online using websockets.

unLagged/

Lag compensation Technique.

Unity3d: Multiplayer Game Development Photon and Ulink comparison

Photon vs. Ulink for multiplayer game networking.

How to create an online multiplayer game with Unity

Step by step guide with code and pictures, very helpful.

Why You Probably Shouldn’t Make a Multiplayer Game

An indie dev with a cautionary tale about making multiplayer games as a small developer.

FPS Games

Useful links for 7dfps

A swathe of useful links for creating an FPS quickly

Game Design

The Infinite Game

Great (long!) article on game replayability and how to keep people interested in your game through many hours of play

Damage Presentation

An article detailing different methods to represent damage being dealt and taken

Why some games feel better than others

An article on making hits & attacks feel more powerful and meaningful

Water finds a crack

An article on game balance, using examples from Civilization

How to Balance an MMO

A window into the life of an MMO balance team’s lives (oh god, why?)

300 Game Ideas

This guy has come up with a game idea every day or so for the past year and has written basic design documents for each. Great resource to expand your brain and stimulate it towards new ideas

Stealth Game Design

A rundown of some of the elements of stealth game design over time

From Student to Professional Game Developer

An article written by someone who has been through the experience. Also includes a great talk linked in the article on the same topic.

Multiplayer Level Design: The Visual Guide

A great infographic on how to design multiplayer levels.

A brief history of levelling systems

A short piece on the creation of stats, levelling up, exp, and many other things!

Sequelitis: Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X

A great video discussing what made mega man great.

Concepts

Duck Typing

Introduction to sorting algorithms

Barycentric Coordinates

Game Math Series

Covers Vector Math, Linear Algebra, Quaternions, and Curves

Stuff that every programmer should know: Data Visualization

Great article explaining why data visualization is so important for programming, with a huge collection of links at the bottom to learn how to visualize data to improve development of software.

AI Systems of L4D

A very cool presentation on the AI systems used in Left 4 Dead

The Poor Mans Dialogue Tree

An indepth look into the classic dialog tree and how it can be improved upon

A* Tutorial

A look at the A* (A star) pathfinding algorithm

Ogre3d

Minimal Ogre Collision

Ogre Camera Control

Unity3d
Save/Load

Saving and loading player progress

Thinking in Components

Article that explains how to wrap your mind around unity’s component system

Hack n Slash RPG Tutorial

285-part series creating a hack n slash game. If you want to learn and have a lot of time on your hands, this would get you all of the basics(and even some advanced stuff).

Audio
Abundant Music

Music creator for people who don’t know how to create music! Great for a small project that needs music fast

GXSCC

8bit audio converter. This site looks sketchy but I’m pretty sure it’s legit. Download at your own risk though?

Game Development

2 Person MMO

A great article that goes through the development (pre&post release) of Growtopia, an MMO created by two guys

The Big List of Postmortems

Amazing collection of post-mortems of various games from various genres. Well worth a read to get an idea of some of the pitfalls of game development

How to build a game from scratch with no budget
How much do indie PC devs make anyway (5 part series)

Amazing series of articles that spans years from an indie dev who (in parts 1-4) struggles to get by from game development. In part 5 he finally hits it big with his latest release. This article gives a great idea of the difficulty of being a struggling developer, which is a side of the story not told often enough.

doPressKit()

A way to make quick press kits to market your game

Thoughts you might have as an Indie Developer

Some words of wisdom to avoid common pitfalls of indie devs.

CompoHub

Very pretty list of game jams currently happening. Get involved if you want to get better at game development!

How we made a PS Vita game with zero budget

Some tips on how to manage to produce a game while still working full time

Game Budgets & Sales

List of game budgets and Sales on a public google doc. Cool data!

What Comes Next?

After you’ve learned to make games, what comes next? This article follow some students from New York University who were given advice from real game developers and were able to jumpstart 6 games.

Design: Inspirations

Zelda: Wind waker Tech and Texture Analysis