Hacker News with Generative AI: Game Development

Measuring Acceleration Structures (zeux.io)
Hardware accelerated raytracing, as supported by DirectX 12 and Vulkan, relies on an abstract data structure that stores scene geometry, known as “acceleration structure” and often referred to as “BVH” or “BLAS”. Unlike geometry representation for rasterization, rendering engines can not customize the data layout; unlike texture formats, the layout is not standardized across vendors.
Graphics, Computer Graphics, Hardware, Ray Tracing, Game Development
72 points by ibobev 13 hours ago | 5 comments
Simulated Economy Tutorial (jasonfantl.com)
Imagine an open world RPG where your actions affect the price of goods, the markets reacting to anything the player may do (burn down wheat fields, cost of food increases; kill the merchants, prices differentiate between cities; sell the many swords you’ve collected on your adventures, tank the sword market). What would it take to have such an adaptive simulated economy?
Game Development, Economics, Artificial Intelligence
103 points by jfantl 1 day ago | 56 comments
An Introduction to Practical 3D Math for Programmers (stunlock.gg)
There are a lot of guides for 3D math that seem to be written by people quite good at math. If instead you're like me and better at programming than math this is the guide I wish I had when I first started learning OpenGL, Direct3D, Shaders, Unity, and Unreal.
3D Graphics, Programming, Game Development
4 points by srid 4 days ago | 0 comments
Thoughts on ECS (voxagon.se)
I mentioned in my year summary that I have a lot to say about ECS, and got several requests to write more about it, so I’ll do an attempt to write up my thoughts here.
Software, Game Development, ECS
23 points by indy 5 days ago | 12 comments
A decompilation and port of Sonic Advance 2-a GameBoy Advance game written in C (github.com/SAT-R)
⚠️ This project is not completed and still under active development
Game Development, Programming, Video Games, Retro Gaming, C Programming
182 points by bane 6 days ago | 39 comments
Let's Make a Space Shooter with Nintendo Family Basic – Leaded Solder (leadedsolder.com)
I picked up a complete Nintendo Family BASIC package for my freshly composite-modded Famicom. Let’s see if I can remember enough BASIC to take advantage of this package and build a horizontally-scrolling space shooter game. Oh, and fix the cartridge first, of course.
Retro Gaming, Programming, Nintendo, BASIC, Game Development
5 points by rbanffy 8 days ago | 0 comments
Building and Publishing Games to Steam Directly from GitHub Actions (nullonerror.org)
I have been using GitHub Actions extensively both at work and in personal projects, as shown in this post What I’ve been automating with GitHub Actions, an automated life.
Game Development, GitHub Actions, Steam, Automation
47 points by delduca 10 days ago | 19 comments
Technicalities of Homeworld 2 Backgrounds (simonschreibt.de)
Game Development, Video Games, Homeworld 2, Graphics, Programming
211 points by todsacerdoti 10 days ago | 72 comments
VibeSail: A case study in vibe coding a game (vibecoding.games)
There are a lot of people sharing the amazing games they're building on X, so it's hard to pick just one to hone in on, but I'm doing just that today with Vibe Sail.
Game Development, Social Media, Case Studies
10 points by thinkingemote 12 days ago | 3 comments
Introduction to Retrogame Programming with Pyxel (garambrogne.net)
Programming, Python, Game Development
6 points by kadrek 12 days ago | 0 comments
EmptyEpsilon open source spaceship bridge simulator (daid.github.io)
EmptyEpsilon is a spaceship bridge simulator game. It's fully open source, so it can be modified in any way people wish.
Open Source, Game Development, Simulation, Space, Gaming
161 points by mmooss 13 days ago | 20 comments
Particle Based Physics Engine in Golang (github.com/rudransh61)
Physix.go is a simple, easy-to-use, and fast physics engine written in GoLang. It provides functions to perform physics calculations efficiently, including particle-based physics simulations.
Physics Engine, Golang, Programming, Game Development
84 points by rudransh61 13 days ago | 15 comments
In 1997, Age of Empires was just coming out. My job was to design a new RTS game (twitter.com)
Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.
Video Games, Game Development, History, Retro Gaming
6 points by tosh 15 days ago | 0 comments
Programming Isn't Enough (fallible.net)
I've been working on a digital, competitive card game for a year now. I started this project with intent to illustrate how to do this kind of thing via some kind of blog post series, but it got out of hand and now it's a "commercial project."
Programming, Game Development, Software Development
30 points by neocritter 16 days ago | 2 comments
The High Heel Problem (simonschreibt.de)
This article looks at how different types of shoes can affect game development and examines how games deal with this in practice.
Game Development, Footwear, Design
332 points by lehi 16 days ago | 41 comments
Making a multiplayer action game in Haskell (gitlab.com)
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Game Development, Haskell, Programming Languages
36 points by vortex_ape 18 days ago | 2 comments
Checkers written in Rust and exported to WASM (kevinalbs.com)
Rust, WebAssembly, Programming Languages, Game Development
89 points by keepamovin 19 days ago | 37 comments
Six mistakes I made in my dioramas-and-felt Steam game and one I didn't (novalis.org)
I'm still working on my point-and-click puzzle game made from dioramas.
Game Development, Indie Games, DIY, Point-and-Click Games
81 points by mjd 19 days ago | 41 comments
Hexagon Spiral Coordinates (redblobgames.com)
My guide to hexagonal grids[1] is one of the most popular pages on my site. I keep a list of things I want to add to that page[2]. One of them has been spiral coordinate systems. I had thought I would wait until I actually use them in a real project, so that I would have real world experience with the thing I’m writing about. I’m afraid of writing about things I’m unsure about, or information that’s incomplete.
Game Development, Programming, Hexagonal Grids, Mathematics
62 points by ibobev 21 days ago | 14 comments
Vibe-gamedev: a tool for AI vibecoding with Unity (github.com/ryholmdahl)
vibe-gamedev is a Unity package that creates an interface between the Unity editor and AI agents, allowing end-to-end vibecoding for game development. It serializes GameObjects to JSON files that can be read and edited by agents, then deserializes those files back into updated GameObjects.
Game Development, Artificial Intelligence, Unity, Tools
5 points by friendshaver 21 days ago | 0 comments
Let's Make a Space Shooter with Nintendo Family Basic (leadedsolder.com)
I picked up a complete Nintendo Family BASIC package for my freshly composite-modded Famicom. Let’s see if I can remember enough BASIC to take advantage of this package and build a horizontally-scrolling space shooter game. Oh, and fix the cartridge first, of course.
Retro Gaming, Programming, Nintendo, Game Development
9 points by zdw 22 days ago | 0 comments
How to Minify Godot's Build Size (93MB –> 6.4MB EXE) (bearblog.dev)
This was an article I wanted to do for ages. Godot's default file size for web exports is quite massive, and there weren't a lot of guides on how to reduce it aside from the official documentation - which gives general information without any numbers or details, leaving people to figure out how effective any of the solutions really are. It also doesn't mention some more advanced tricks we can use which I'll mention here.
Game Development, Godot Engine, Optimization
34 points by popcar2 22 days ago | 5 comments
Show HN: Factorio Learning Environment – Agents Build Factories (jackhopkins.github.io)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities at solving complex question-answer (QA) problems, saturating benchmarks in factual recollection, reasoning and code generation.
Show HN, Machine Learning, Game Development, Artificial Intelligence
749 points by noddybear 23 days ago | 209 comments
A Library for Point and Click Adventures (github.com/pinguin999)
ALPACA (short for "A Library for Point And Click Adventures") is a game engine for adventure games and interactive comics.
Game Development, Programming, Libraries
25 points by pinguin999 23 days ago | 0 comments
The Early History of Deferred Shading and Lighting (sites.google.com)
At the 2004 Game Developer Conference Matt Pritchard (one of my coworkers at the now closed Ensemble Studios who wrote Age of Empires 2's graphics code), John Brooks (CTO and my boss at Blue Shift Inc., the graphics programmer on "Super Mario Wacky Worlds") and I came out of the cold and gave a fairly rushed, but groundbreaking 1 hour presentation on real-time deferred rendering techniques to an audience of 300-400 people.
Game Development, Graphics Programming, History, Computer Graphics
44 points by davikr 25 days ago | 2 comments
Asking LLMs to create my game Shepard's Dog (github.com/vnglst)
I've had this game concept in mind for years. While I've built several prototypes, getting the sheep flocking behavior right proved challenging. Now, with LLMs showing impressive programming capabilities, I'm curious to see what game they can create when given the same prompt (see below).
Game Development, Programming, Artificial Intelligence
155 points by vnglst 26 days ago | 55 comments
From Prompt to Adventures:Creating Games with LLMs and Restate Durable Functions (restate.dev)
In this article, we’ll explore how to take a single user prompt and generate an entire Choose Your Own Adventure game from it using Restate.
Generative AI, Game Development
49 points by ivanleomk 26 days ago | 14 comments
Using GRPO to Beat o1, o3-mini and R1 at “Temporal Clue” (openpipe.ai)
In this post we’ll discuss how we used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to surpass R1, o1, o3-mini, and come within a couple percentage points of Sonnet 3.7 on a reasoning-heavy game called “temporal clue”, while being over 100x cheaper to run at inference time. We’ll include specific lessons learned about task design and hyperparameters we’ve found to work well. And finally, we share the training recipe we used to achieve these results, built on top of torchtune.
Artificial Intelligence, Reinforcement Learning, Game Development, Optimization
199 points by kcorbitt 27 days ago | 55 comments
Mountains, Cliffs, and Caves: A Guide to Using Perlin Noise for Procedural Gen (jdhwilkins.com)
Procedural generation is everywhere—you’ve probably encountered it without even realising. It’s what gives in-game worlds their rolling hills, jagged cliffs, and winding cave systems. And at the heart of it all is Perlin noise: a special kind of randomness that isn’t entirely random at all. It’s smooth where it needs to be, rough when we want it to be, and endlessly customizable.
Procedural Generation, Game Development, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Graphics
176 points by chwolfe 29 days ago | 35 comments
Show HN: Bad ALIENS, 5yo and dad build a game in 8h with AI (nicroto.github.io)
AI, Game Development, Family, Creative Projects, Show HN
8 points by tsenkov 30 days ago | 3 comments