Game Development Learning Resources

Over the years I’ve collected hundreds of game development resources, talks, and tutorials in my personal bookmarks. Many of these I stumbled upon and may be difficult to find on your own. This list intends to provide a large number of learning resources to everyone in a single convenient place - biased to topics I found most interesting myself at the time.

Check out the Unreal Engine Bookmarks page!

Game Design

• Into the Breach Design Postmortem - GDC
  Insightful talk about the design process that turned into ‘Into the Breach’. Filled with useful lessons and mistakes.
• What Makes Games Good - Tom Francis
  Design insight by Tom Francis about what makes games ‘good’.
• Natural Numbers in Game Design - Tom Francis
  A term used by Tom Francis to describe ‘numbers you can see’.
• Legacy Games: From Risk to Pandemic to SeaFall & Beyond - GDC
  “Legacy” Board games talk by Rob Daviau about how they’ve influenced other games, and what game designers can learn from them.
• Designing Path of Exile to Be Played Forever - GDC
  Grinding Gear Games’ Chris Wilson describes how Path of Exile has been designed to retain and grow its community for the very long term. (GDC 2019)_
• How upgrading cards fuels Monster Train’s wild ride - Rock Paper Shotgun
  Monster Train’s developers talk about the design behind card upgrades in Rock Paper Shotgun’s “The Mechanic”.
• Probability and Games: Damage Rolls - Red Blob Games
  Beautifully made interactive article on probability about rolling dice.
• Normal Distribution - Math Is Fun
  Bell curves will be valuable asset in your designer/programmer tool belt.
• Keys to Combat: Anatomy of an Attack - GD Keys
  Breaking down the elements of enemy attacks telegraphing and case studies.
• Approaches to designing projectiles for players and AI - Chris Proctor | Bungie
  Deep dive talk in the projectiles of Destiny.

Programming

• Math for Game Programmers: Noise-Based RNG - GDC
  “Squirrel Eiserloh discuss RNGs vs. noise functions, and shows how the latter can replace the former in your math library…”
• Advanced Randomness Techniques for Game AI
  GameAIPro article covering Gaussian Randomness, Filtered Randomness, and Perlin Noise
• Data Oriented Design (Or Why You Might Be Shooting Yourself in The Foot With OOP) A nice introduction of some advantages of DoD compared to the standard Object-oriented programming. Gets you started on the journey of DoD for performance and code simplicity.
• Book: Data Oriented Design Insightful book about programming with a data first approach to help CPU performance. Linked the digital version, I recommend grabbing the physical book if you are into DoD.
• Data-oriented Design Resources Large collection of DoD resources to really dig into this subject.

Procedural Generation

• Wave Function Collapse tips and tricks - Boristhebrave
  A commonly applied (constrained-based) procedural algorithm to turn tile sets into levels.
• Dungeon Generation in Binding of Isaac - Boristhebrave
  Detailed outsiders analysis of this Indie-gem roguelike’s procedural world.
• Dungeon Generation in Enter The Gungeon - Boristhebrave
  Another breakdown by boristhebrave, this time for the roguelike bullet hell ‘Enter The Gungeon’.
• Tile-Based Procedural Terrain Generation - Dominik Scholz
  Bachelor’s Thesis on procedural generation with tiles.
• Wave - WFC Interactive Demo - Oskar Stalberg
  Great example of Wave Function Collapse and how it resolves constraints.
• Beyond Townscapers SGC21 - Oskar Stålberg
  Insightful talk on procedural generation concepts including dual grids.

Animation

• SLOW IN & SLOW OUT - The 12 Principles of Animation in Games - New Frame Plus
  What is ‘slow in & slow out’ and how is it applied in major games.

User Interfaces

• Game UI Database
  _A large set of game UI screenshots. A fantastic reference tool for UI Designers.
• Laws of UX
  Helpful overview of the ‘laws of UX’ as they apply to user interfaces.

Retrospectives

• Half Life 2 Tech Demo (E3 2003)
  The now classic HL2 Tech Demo showing off impressive material and physical effects for its time.

Production

• Don’t Break the Chain: Maintaining Productivity on Your 19th Game
  “In this 2018 GDC talk, developer Jason Rohrer presents tested techniques he’s used over the past 12 years, working alone, to ship 18 games.”
• Matthew Walker talks for two hours about the importance of sleep.
  Don’t underestimate taking a break, Matthew Walker explains why.
• Dealing with Scope Change in Heat Signature and Gunpoint
  Insightful GDC talk by Tom Francis on his indie development journey. Highly recommend all of his work.

Visual Effects

• League’s VFX Style Guide
  _Great guide with some rules and guidelines to improve readability and clarity of your VFX for gameplay.

Marketing

• The Diary of a Modern PR Campaign: How to Plan Your Game’s Promotion
  “Future Friends Games’ Thomas Reisenegger discusses practical elements such as tools, rough timelines and checklists you can consider for each stage of your PR campaign.”
• The Best Debug Tools for Game Capture - Derek Lieu
  Preparing your game for easy game trailer/screenshot capture.
• Slay the Spire: Success through Marketability - GDC
  “…the process and thoughts on adding value to a game, building a community, and how various decisions factored into making Slay the Spire one of the top-selling indie games of 2018.”

Blogs

• Tom Francis
  Insightful thoughts on game design, especially through his YouTube Design Talk series.
• Daniel Cook [LostGarden]
  “You’ve found a rare treasure trove of readable, thoughtful essays on game design theory, art and the business of design.”
• Simon schreibt.
  Blog on re-creating many impressive game art (rendering) tricks.
• Soren Johnson [Designer Notes]
  Includes Podcast-style interviews with fellow game developers.
• GDKeys
  Variety of insightful articles on game development.
• Red Blob Games
  Insightful and beautifully crafted interactive blog about math and algorithms.

Indie

• Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage
  Valuable GDC talk about signing your work and why as an indie developer.
• Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics - GDC
  Danny Day explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game.

Post Mortems

These are some of my favorite post mortems that give an insight into development of games.

• How Thief’s Stealth System Almost Didn’t Work
  “Paul Neurath recounts the difficulties creating Thief: The Dark Project, and how its AI systems had to be completely rewritten years into development.” War Stories is a great series on game development.
• Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online
  “Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott de Cayeux & Rich Vogel talk about the things that went wrong and right during the development and operation of Ultima Online.”
• All Systems No: Learning from the Doomed Launch of Brigador
  “Stellar Jockeys’ Hugh Monahan dissects the development and release of Brigador from both marketing and design perspectives, to help you learn from what went wrong for them.”
• Crafting A Tiny Open World: A Short Hike Postmortem
  A delightful look into the development of ‘A Short Hike’.
• The Last Game I Make Before I Die: The Crashlands Postmortem
  “…Butterscotch Shenanigans’ Samuel Coster tells the parallel stories of one family’s battle with cancer and the creation of a cross-platform crafting RPG…”

Misc.

• Who finds the Glitches used in Speedruns?
  “How are glitches even found? Are they found by accident, or how would anyone even think of doing 100 perfect inputs in a very specific order?”