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Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

handmadehero.org

41–50 of 79 posts

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#41

Casey is really well known in the gaming community - https://mollyrocket.com/casey/about.html Through Handmade Con, he's also interviewed many other creators like Jonathan Blow and Edmund Mcmillen. He also contributed to Blow's recent game, The Witness (specifically the movement system and the world editor). This is a really good series by an experienced game developer that's basically free (or at least the Zed Shaw…

He also has some pretty cool articles on finding all walkable areas of the map ("walk_monster.cpp")and how he improved the grass planting system:

https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0006.html

https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0015.html

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#42
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comments are enabled on the Twitch stream, in case you ever want to catch it live again.

If he saves Twitch vods, they contain the live comments as well as new comments from vod viewers.

He doesn't anymore. He has a portion before the stream where he likes to talk about things that are not code-related (like his opinions on X), and he doesn't want those recorded. As I understand it, people were taking the vods and posting snippets to Youtube, which went against the spirit.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#43
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also he's using emacs. Not anymore.

What is he using now?

He's using 4coder - https://4coder.handmade.network/

He likes that its configuration language is C, so he doesn't have to learn a configuration language to get things done.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#44
To each their own, but for me the series were just too slow. As in, it felt like half the streams were just going over the basics and explaining every little detail. Which I'm sure some enjoy, but if you're like me, I'd recommend Jonathan Blows streams (naysayer88 on Twitch) for a little faster development.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#45

A comment thread from a couple years ago that resonated with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11087399 I watched about a dozen Handmade Hero episodes, and I was a bit annoyed that every session resulted in a random hunt to fix a bunch of bugs because there was not sufficient abstraction. It wouldn't be so bad if the abstractions were upcoming, but Casey seems to have an aversion to abstraction and I stopped w…

That's the exact point of HM. Abstractions come from the knowledge gained after wrestling with problems, not as a form of premature optimization. And this is especially true in games because you need to get all abstractions right otherwise the game will be limited and/or not performant enough. In many other programming fields you don't get punished for adding a few abstractions that are not strictly necessary, so usu…

I'd say you're right if we'd talk about a junior dev, but not when talking about a seasoned senior.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#46
post #44

To each their own, but for me the series were just too slow. As in, it felt like half the streams were just going over the basics and explaining every little detail. Which I'm sure some enjoy, but if you're like me, I'd recommend Jonathan Blows streams (naysayer88 on Twitch) for a little faster development.

Thank you for that, I had no idea he streamed. The Witness is one of my all time favorite games.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#47
I've followed the first ~50 or so videos mainly because I'm interested in 2D game design and game physics at the basic levels (writing engines and physics).

Commenting to ask if anyone has additional resources / streams / guides on those topics they can recommend.

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#48
post #44

To each their own, but for me the series were just too slow. As in, it felt like half the streams were just going over the basics and explaining every little detail. Which I'm sure some enjoy, but if you're like me, I'd recommend Jonathan Blows streams (naysayer88 on Twitch) for a little faster development.

That's what youtube 1.5x / 2x speedup is for ;-)

Re: Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch

#49
I've already gone through 3 weeks worth of Handmade Hero episodes but stopped because of my busy schedule. During that short time I was able to appreciate the value of having full control over your code.

I've built a career using game engines other people have made. Sometimes it bothers me that I do not know what's going on behind the hood because of all the layers of abstraction. It's nice to be able to make something quickly, but the programmer in me feels sad that I'd have to trust things to just work without me knowing how.

Handmade Hero showed me how things work behind the scenes and it inspired me to be more aware of the internals of what I'm using as much as possible. Now I make it into a point to delve into documentations and source codes and am now also playing around with low level languages (Like C and Rust) during my free time. Overall these have helped me a lot and I look forward to improving myself more.

So kudos and thanks to Casey for this series. It has helped me strive to become a better programmer.

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