Game Programming Patterns

What Hacker News says

1. rramadassJul 2026
   Caches and Memory Systems have to be looked at from three related perspectives viz. a) Hardware/SoC/Physical level b) OS/Compiler system software level c) Applications usage level.

   To that end;

   1) Buy/Beg/Borrow/Steal the Curt Schimmel book mentioned above. That one book will teach you all about how OSes manage caches/memory for SMP multiprocessing systems. You really get to understand multiprocessing at a fundamental level.

   2) Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk by Bruce Jacob et al. - Old classic and a comprehensive book on all aspects of memory systems. Supplement with papers on newer technologies as needed.

   3) Ulrich Drepper's classic What every Programmer should know about Memory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420502

   4) Cache-Oblivious Algorithm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache-oblivious_algorithm See in particular, Harald Prokop's thesis on the above linked to under "References" section.

   5) Cache-aware Programming pattern from the book Game Programming Patterns - https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/data-locality.html

   6) There are lots more resources on cache-aware programming and using compiler builtins to help you do it. Here is a list of tips - https://johnnysswlab.com/make-your-programs-run-faster-by-be... This website has a lot of info. on all aspects of memory optimization.

   7) AoS and SoA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AoS_and_SoA

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2. RyanODJun 2026
   I've made games in Löve and with straight Python and it's always a lot of fun...though challenging at times. Where I tend to struggle is with the overall game structure. Without being an actual professional programmer (nevermind a game programmer), I'm always wrestling with how to design the code structure in a way that is logical and professional. Leveraging common game design patterns isn't at all straight forward for a person like me.

   Here are two resources I found quite helpful...

   https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

   https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns

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3. bbminnerDec 2025
   I think it is difficult to oversell the bob nystrom game patterns book

   https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html

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4. kamranjonAug 2025
   A really good book I read recently was Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom - I think it has helped me, as a more traditional software engineer, to dip my toes into game development in a way that doesn't feel like a spaghetti plate full of hacks and tricks. I recommend it.
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5. ethan_smithJul 2025
   Check out "Game Programming Patterns" by Robert Nystrom and the GDC Vault for technical deep-dives. For HOMM specifically, the VCMI project (open-source HOMM3 engine) has source code that reveals implementation details like their A* pathfinding and combat AI systems.
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6. _cawMay 2025
   Haven't seen stitch-maps, that is useful.

   I've also been thinking about what constitutes a "good" encoding, and it definitely comes down to individual preferences, even preferences in a given moment. Today you're reading off a sticky-note and want to optimize for size, tomorrow you're laying out 3 notebooks for a huge project and want clarity.

   I like the idea of a creator making the base pattern, and then sharing a link that lets the user customize the output encoding.

   That customization could be visual (I want a different random seed that is used to parameterize different aspects of this pattern, so it's totally unique to me) or in the notation.

   I think it'd be awesome to have a recursive notation editor. So you'd click on a variable and it expands to the verbose representation, which might include other nested variables that you can further expand (or not).

   (side note, I hope you don't mind: Game Programming Patterns made a huge difference for me early in my career, thank you for bringing that into the world.)

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