Game Development Learning Resources

Over the years I’ve collected hundreds of gamedev 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.

Game Design

• Into the Breach Design Postmortem – GDC
  [Watch] Insightful talk about the design process that turned into ‘Into the Breach’. Filled with useful lessons and mistakes.
• What Makes Games Good – Tom Francis
  [Read] Design insight by Tom Francis about what makes games ‘good’.
• Natural Numbers in Game Design – Tom Francis
  [Read] A term used by Tom Francis to describe ‘numbers you can see’.
• Legacy Games: From Risk to Pandemic to SeaFall & Beyond – GDC
  [Watch] “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
  [Watch] 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
  [Read] 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
  [Read] Beautifully made interactive article on probability about rolling dice.
• Normal Distribution – Math Is Fun
  [Read] Bell curves will be valuable asset in your designer/programmer toolbelt.
• Boss Battle Design and Structure – Gamasutra
  [Read] Boss design patterns and examples from existing games.
• Keys to Combat: Anatomy of an Attack – GD Keys
  [Read] Breaking down the elements of enemy attacks telegraphing and case studies.

Programming

• Math for Game Programmers: Noise-Based RNG – GDC
  [Watch] “Squirrel Eiserloh discuss RNGs vs. noise functions, and shows how the latter can replace the former in your math library…”

Procedural Generation

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

AI

• Are Waypoint Graphs Outnumbered? Not in AlienSwarm! – AIGameDev
  [Read] Navmesh is all the rage, but navigation nodes may still have their place. (oldie via waybackmachine)

Animation

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

Localization

• Localizing Bungie’s Destiny for the World – GDC
  [Watch] Interesting talk on how Bungie localized in-world assets, spoken dialogue, and text in Destiny. (GDC 2015)
• Industries of Titan Localization Lessons – Ben UI
  [Read] Lessons learned from Titan of Industries localization efforts.

User Interfaces

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

Retrospectives

• Half Life 2 Tech Demo (E3 2003)
  [Watch] 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
  [Watch] “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.
  [Watch] Don’t underestimate taking a break, Matthew Walker explains why.
• Dealing with Scope Change in Heat Signature and Gunpoint
  [Watch] Insightful GDC talk by Tom Francis on his indie development journey. Highly recommend all of his work.

Artifical Intelligence

• Advanced Randomness Techniques for Game AI
  [Read] GameAIPro article covering Gaussian Randomness, Filtered Randomness, and Perlin Noise

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
  [Watch] “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
  [Read] Preparing your game for easy game trailer/screenshot capture.
• Slay the Spire: Success through Marketability – GDC
  [Watch] “…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
  [Watch] Valuable GDC talk about signing your work and why as an indie developer.
• Shipping Kills Studios: A Study of Indie Team Dynamics – GDC
  [Watch] Danny Day explains how to keep your indie team alive after shipping a successful game.

Post Mortems

• How Thief’s Stealth System Almost Didn’t Work
  [Watch] “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
  [Watch] “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
  [Watch] “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
  [Watch] A delightful look into the development of ‘A Short Hike’.
• The Last Game I Make Before I Die: The Crashlands Postmortem
  [Watch] “…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?
  [Watch] “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?”