Red Blob Games Blog

(BTW, Norman's server seems to be suffering under the load; https://web.archive.org/web/20210223015500/https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/noweb/ 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…

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

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/

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.html
[2] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023/04/improving-mapgen4s-boundaries-part-2.html

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/