Red Blob Games Blog

Am going to chime in as well - Amit is amazing and has been providing his knowledge and experience since the early 90's, when I first encountered him on FidoNet over BBS, then next on Usenet. Regular tech blog: https://amitp.blogspot.com/ Game Dev blog: https://simblob.blogspot.com/

RotMG has a great idea that I wish more games would copy: difficulty scales with elevation. If you want to take it easy, stick to the coasts. If you want a challenge, strike inland towards the mountains (or follow a river upstream). It's a great way of intuitively expressing difficulty ranges across a sprawling world map, and I remember being disappointed the first time that I played Skyrim that it didn't seem to do the same. For posterity, here's Amit on map generation: https://simblob.blogspot.com/2010/01/simple-map-generation.html

This year I've mostly been updating existing pages in small ways (examples: [1] [2]). This week I've been fixing broken links, which isn't a good HN submission. I think the best candidate is https://www.redblobgames.com/making-of/draggable/ . It's from earlier this year and hasn't been posted to HN yet (I think). [1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023/04/explaining-hexagon-layout-class.h… [2] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023/04/improving-mapgen4s-boundaries-par…

For those that enjoy this style of article, Amit Patel's Red Blob Games site[0] has similarly well-written and interactive articles, mostly regarding pathfinding and map generation in games. He also wrote an article[1] about how he creates the interactive elements of these articles, and a lot of "background" information about the articles on redblobgames.com can be found on his other blog[2]. [0] https://www.redblobgames.com/ [1] https://www.redblobgames.com/making-of/line-drawing/ [2] https://simblob.blogspot.com/

Here's a few more, from my Feedly: Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/ Fabien Sanglard - https://fabiensanglard.net/ Rachel - http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ Bruce Eckel - https://bruceeckel.substack.com/ (old blog @ https://www.bruceeckel.com/) Blobs in Games - https://simblob.blogspot.com/ Astrid dot tech - https://astrid.tech/ Brendan Gregg - https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/ Stargirl Flowers - https://blog.thea.codes/

For you and those that played any of the 4-7 for comparison, how was the change in map scale compared to pace of wilderness? I was reading this https://simblob.blogspot.com/2014/05/map-homunculus.html?m=1 and it shows dev reasoning for the changes, but I'm curious how gamers actually took it. Was it better before or after?

Different word order (especially, verb-noun order [1]), different syntax for affixes and adpositions, difficulty in segmentation and even the non-existence of English-like "words", ... You can't "localize" programming languages in that way. A new programming language, probably similar in semantics but with a completely rethought syntax, is needed for the true localization. [1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2019/10/verb-noun-vs-noun-verb.html

Weird/wrong URL. Correct version: http://simblob.blogspot.com/2019/03/improving-island-shaping-for-map.h… You should resubmit the post with the correct URL.

Ah, then some useful algorithms and keywords to study would be OpenGL, voxel rendering, A* pathfinding, cellular autonoma, perlin noise, etc. Red Blob Games has a lot of good articles covering many of these subjects, here's a few: https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction.html https://simblob.blogspot.com/search/label/noise

Link doesn't work for me, but I found the article on the site: http://simblob.blogspot.com/2017/09/mapgen2-html5.html

(BTW, Norman's server seems to be suffering under the load; https://web.archive.org/web/20210223015500/https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~n… has your (Way)Back if you're suffering problems in accessing it.) I've been interested in literate programming for a long time; for my self-bootstrapping PEG parser https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md I wrote my own noweb-like system called HandAxeWeb in Lua (5.x) https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/handaxeweb.md. It accepts input in Markdown, HTML, ReStructuredText, etc., and it's only a couple hundred lines of Lua. For HandAxeWeb (named following the convention of StoneKnifeForth—the intent was to make it simple enough that even fairly early stages of a bootstrap could be literate programs), I wanted to be able to include multiple versions of a program in the same document, because I think it's often helpful to see the temporal development of a program from a simpler version to a more complex version. The simpler version is easier to understand and helps you focus on the most fundamental aspects of the program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoWqdEACyLI is a 5'30" screencast (not by me) of explaining the development of a Pong program in this fashion. I think it's usually easier to understand a program in this fashion than by trying to understand the final complete version bit by bit, the way something like "TeX: The Program" forces you to do. ๛ Still, generally speaking, soi-disant…