📈 Now You're Cooking! - Announce Postmortem
A little over two weeks ago, I announced my roguelike deckbuilder Now You’re Cooking!. As promised, here’s my postmortem on the announce. Read more...
TechDesign
Games by Mason.
Game development, tech commentary, and creative projects.
Recent essays
30 of 31🌆 Indie Is Not A Genre, It's A Scene
Indie is not a genre. Nor is indie synonymous with “low budget”, “self published” or “small team”. Each of these definitions have counter examples–I encourage you to come up with your own before expanding the spoilers. Spoilers If Rockstar developed Balatro, i…
🍳 Now You're Cooking! - Game Announce
I’m finally able to announce what I’ve been building in my Zig game engine! If you want to support me, the two best things you can do are: Wishlist Now You’re Cooking! on Steam Share the trailer with friends or communities who are into deckbuilders Expect some…
⏰ Fix Your Input Latency
I just uploaded a public version of a talk I wrote for a client on strategies for reducing input latency: On a related note, I’ll be speaking about market research at PIGCon next month! If you enjoyed It’s Not Survivorship Bias, this will be a deeper dive into…
🧮 How To Write Fast Game Engine Math
Text Version YES: Congratulations, things are easy and fast! Task Complete. No: GOTO 2. YES: GOTO 1. NO: GOTO 3. YES: GOTO 1. NO: Zoom in on the graph. GOTO 3. Following these steps results in apparent black magic such as replacing inverse square roots with -0…
👀 It's Not About the API - Fast, Flexible, and Simple Rendering in Vulkan
Many programmers consider Vulkan to be overly complex–maybe not even worth engaging with as an indie. It’s easy to see why people feel this way. If this is how you view Vulkan or modern graphics APIs in general, the goal of this talk is to change your mind. Re…
🪟 Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable
When you think Microsoft you probably don’t think sense of humor. And yet, I’m convinced that Microsoft is going to do a very specific very funny thing within our lifetimes. In 2017 I predicted that most programmers would lose their employer employee bargainin…
🔉 Statically Linking PipeWire
I recently helped Tuple solve an interesting problem. They’re working on a Linux version of their pair programming tool, and they want to make it a fully static executable so that they can ship the same build everywhere. Alright no big deal, just link any depe…
🖼️ Stop Shipping PNGs In Your Games
Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach. I’ll also share my implementation of the suggested approach, but if you’d rather do it yourself I’ll provide…
🌴 What I Learned from Staying Inside
Conference Site Okay, not literally staying inside. Every year Chris Zukowski puts on an online conference called Staying Inside about marketing indie games. I technically watched some of the recordings while outside because the weather’s been great in Portlan…
ZCS — An Entity Component System in Zig
I’m writing a new game engine in Zig, and I’m open sourcing each module as I write it. Today I released the beta version of my entity component system ZCS, I’ll consider it a beta until I’ve shipped my next Steam game using it. You can find the documentation h…
Tweening in Zig
Lerp, or linear interpolation, is a convenient way to animate stuff in games without having to store much state: const position = lerp(start, end, time); This will move position linearly from start to end as time moves from 0 to 1. Unfortunately, linear motion…
Powered by Z[ig|ine]
Since shipping Way of Rhea last year I’ve been hard at work on game two, but I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like. Every time I sit down to write a blog post in Jekyll, my Ruby dependencies are somehow broken again. Any time spent trying to sort this out…
Highlights from "I spent 6 years developing a game in Rust and it just shipped, AMA"
I recently released Way of Rhea, a puzzle game that I’ve been working on in Rust since 2018. If you like games like Braid, Talos Principle, or Portal you’d probably enjoy it: After launch I posted an AMA on r/rust_gamedev, and people asked a lot of great quest…
Thank you, & the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase
Hey everyone–thanks so much for a great launch day. After having worked on this game for so long, it’s an amazing feeling seeing so many folks enjoy it. :) We hit 10 reviews on day 1, and at the time of writing are at 24 positive reviews: My new goal is to get…
Way of Rhea Out Now!
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who’s helped make this happen in any way, this is the culmination of years of hard work–I don’t even wanna say how many years it’s been here, if you know you know. As of now, Way of Rhea is out on Steam! I hope you all enjoy p…
Way of Rhea releases tomorrow! - The End Game
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam TOMORROW! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers The End Game. For many players, the biomes up until this point will be sufficiently challenging…
Way of Rhea releases in 2 days! - The Professor's Biome
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 2 days! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers The Professor’s Biome. The professor is kind of a jerk. This area introduces The Professor, an…
Way of Rhea releases in 3 days! - Rhea's Biome
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 3 days! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers Rhea’s Biome. This area introduces Rhea, and color circuits. Read more...
Way of Rhea releases in 4 days! - The Overworld
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 4 days! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers The Overworld. Read more...
Way of Rhea releases in 5 days! - Snow Crab's Biome
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 5 days! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers the second area in the game, Snow Crab’s Biome. Hermie got lost in the Ice Caves trying to hel…
Way of Rhea releases in 6 days! - Shrew's Biome
In celebration of Way of Rhea releasing on Steam in 6 days, I’m making a post a day about a different aspect of the game. Let’s look at the first area of the game: Shrew’s Biome. Be warned–this blog series features mild spoilers! Shrew is your excitable friend…
Way of Rhea releases in 7 days!
Way of Rhea releases on Steam in 7 days! In celebration, starting tomorrow I’m making a post a day, each about a new aspect of the game. Read more...
Way of Rhea - Release Date Announcement
Today I’m excited to announce: Way of Rhea is coming to Steam on May 20th, 2024! I want to thank everyone who’ve been patiently waiting for the game to come out–your support means a lot. If you’re excited for the game, the best way to help is: Wishlist Way of…
Announcing the Way of Rhea Closed Beta!
Exciting news–we’re starting the closed beta of Way of Rhea! I’m going to be running it through our Discord. I’m only adding a couple people at a time so that I have time to address feedback between participants–if you want me to add you to the list, ping me t…
Generating unique values for IMGUI IDs
An IMGUI. Sometimes, you just want some unique bits to use as an ID. Maybe you’re working with an immediate mode GUI, or need to generate IDs for cancellable sounds. In many cases you could technically get away with manually enumerating the various unique IDs…
Replying to YouTube Comments on my SYCL Talk
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from 29 years of internet, it’s not to reply to YouTube comments. Let’s do it anyway! I gave a talk at Software You Can Love (SYCL) titled It’s Not About The Technology - Game Engines are Art Tools. The YouTube recording premi…
LUCID Kickstarter Goes Live!
A game I do some programming for, LUCID, just went live with its Kickstarter! I’m sure Eric would appreciate your support. Don’t worry—I’m still hard at work on Way of Rhea—I typically have a few projects in the oven at a time. :) Read more...
It's Not About the Technology - Game Engines are Art Tools
In June, I gave a talk at Software You Can Love titled It’s Not About The Technology - Game Engines are Art Tools. The intended audience was systems programmers, but there are lessons here for people evaluating off the shelf systems as well. This is a part two…
Make Your Own Game Engine
Recent events have a lot of studios thinking about their choice of game engine, and at first glance, options appear to be limited. But things don’t have to be this way. For most studios, the optimal short term strategy is to wait and see if Unity is forced to…