Game engine architecture

What Hacker News says

1. KapuraFeb 2025
   The Art of Game Design is a very good jumping off point; it's how i got my start, and it gives you a lot of windows to look through.

   A few years after getting that book, I started to work professionally with people building games, mostly white-labelled projects or contract work, which was the studio's bread and butter. But actually working with people developed my understanding of a) the relative value that artists, designers, and animators bring to the project, relative to my own set of skills and b) how to solve the sorts of problems that ship games. I am a programmer, and I use my programmer skills to give designers and artists what they ask for.

   All of that to say: the best next step is working with folks, ideally some who have had experience. Book learning will only get you so far.

   That being said, here are a few more books I have seen recommended in my sphere:

   - The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander (this is not about games, but design generally)

   - Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse

   - Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory (this is a technical book about modern game engines)

   Finally, Liz England (a designer who lowkey helped me not lose hope when I was breaking into the industry) has/had a blog where she talks about game design books. I cannot personally vouch for the titles, but I trust Liz England [1]

   [1] https://lizengland.com/blog/game-design-library/

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2. optymizerAug 2024
   I would split the books into two categories: those that improve the way you structure your code and deliver a software solution, and those that improve your technical understanding of the software platform and the computer you're using.

   The first are books like Pragmatic Programmer, Mythical Man Month, Code Complete, Design Patterns, talks by Alan Kay on software systems and OOP, even Game Engine Architecture etc. A lot of the content there is distilled experience which is much faster to learn from a book than gain the hard way on the job.

   The other books are practical deep dives. Here I would recommend a variety of books like Inside the Machine by Stokes, Computer Architecture by Hennessy, 21st Century C by Klemens, Crafting Interpreters by Nystrom, Compilers by Aho, Effective Java, Nature of Code by Shiffman, Ray Tracing Challenge by Buck, Hands on Hacking by Hickey, and others, depending on your interest and area of focus.

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3. kjuulhJun 2024
   If you want something on the more application side, I.e. utilization of low-level techniques, I can highly recommend looking into game engine development, even if you aren't interested in games per say.

   I've recently enjoyed Game Engine Architecture, mostly because there is an interesting mix using low level techniques to solve problems a normal application wouldn't be required to fix.

   Game development in general is case for tuning yourself to when you should utilize high level programming techniques, and when required dropping into low level optimization to solve local problems.

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4. harrison_clarkeJun 2024
   game engine architecture, by jason gregory

   there's a section on memory allocation patterns

   i believe casey muratori talks about allocation patterns in the handmade hero video series, too

   edit: ryan fleury has a talk: https://www.rfleury.com/p/enter-the-arena-talk

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5. vsuperpower2020Feb 2024
   I've read through this book 3 times over the years and it's very misguided. If you're working on a game and the words "gang of four" pop into your head you unfortunately have suffered permanent brain damage. The main problem with this book is that it focuses on things that are not actually issues for game development. Instead of deep knowledge you learn trivial factoids.

   You don't need or want a service locator in most cases, but if you read a book like this you'll be trained that it's some necessary and integral part of game development. If you can figure out how to draw trees, you can also figure out how not to duplicate their mesh/texture 200 times with their "flyweight pattern". You almost certainly don't want a bytecode interpreter in your game. You shouldn't be thinking in terms of prototypes. The only useful "pattern" in the book is the singleton, and hedged with "Despite noble intentions, the Singleton pattern described by the Gang of Four usually does more harm than good.".

   It teaches complete beginners to think incorrectly about how games should be developed, but it covers enough topics will entertain people. If you want a book, I would suggest "Game Engine Architecture" because it goes much more in depth on what actually goes into a game engine instead of abstract design patterns from textbooks that are somewhere between maliciously bad and incompetent.

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6. vkazanovFeb 2024
   The book is a well-written and charismatic collection of the author's ideas andunderstanding of programming in general mostly from an OOP angle, which was all the rage everywhere during 2000s. He also likes his compilers a lot and it shows.

   And yes, Game Engine Architecture is definitely a much better reference to the core engine building business.

   But games and gamedev these days is not about that as well. Most of the technical problems are solved by the big engine trio. So all devs do is game rules and logic scripting...

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