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Game Development Resources

Game Mechanics

• Historical Games: Description of old board and card games.
• How roguelike is your game?
• SPI game rules: Digital rule books of the various board and war games made by SPI.
• Squidi’s 300 game mechanics.

Algorithms

• Game developer’s guide to graphical projections: Part 1, Part 2.
• Maze algorithms.
• Perlin noise tutorial.
• Procedural terrain generation with distance fields.
• The Nature of Code: Particle systems, physics libraries, cellular automata, fractals, and more.
• Red Blob Games: Tutorials to procedural map generation, path finding, line drawing, geometry.

Software Rendering

• The Beauty of Bresenham’s Algorithm: Introduction to plotting lines, circles, ellipses and Bézier curves.
• Extremely Fast Line Algorithm.
• Lou’s Pseudo 3D Page: 3D projections for racing games.
• Lode’s Computer Graphics Tutorial: Ray casting in Euclidean vector space.
• Ray casting in 2D game engines: Basic algorithm description.
• Ray casting Tutorial: Trigonometric approach.
• Building a Raycasting Engine.
• Triangle rasterisation in C++.
• Voxel Space: Comanche-like terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code.
• Ken Silverman’s Voxlap page.

Code Reviews

• Analyzing the A.I. of Super Mario 64.
• Decoded: OpenTTD: Code review of OpenTTD.
• Fabien Sanglard’s code reviews of game sources.

Sprites & Tile Sets

• 420 pixel art icons for RPGs.
• Creative Commons Pixel Art: For side-scrolling and roguelike games (CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA).
• DENZI: Creative Commons RPG tile sets.
• itch.io: Free and commercial ($) game assets, including sprites, textures, sound, and music.
  • Shadow of the Wyrm Sprite Pack: 600+ 1-bit RPG sprites in 16×24 (MIT).
• Free Tilemaps: public domain or CC licenced RPG tilesets.
• Last Guardian Sprites: 700 fantasy-themed avatar images (32×32).
• Lost Garden: Free game graphics.
• Kenney: CC0-licenced 2D and 3D art.
• Open Game Art: Free game resources (sprites, textures, sounds, …).
  • 16×16 broad purpose old-school tileset (CC0)
• Realm667 Repository: Sprites, textures, and sounds for Doom-style games.
• Reiner’s Tilesets: isometric sprites of animals, vehicles, monsters, buildings, and others.
• The RLTiles: Public domain graphical tileset (32×32) for roguelike games, used in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (online tile viewer).
• SpriteLib: collection of static and animated graphic objects, created between 1992 and 2002.
• Sprite FX: Large collection of sprite effects.
• Sprite Resources: Ripped graphics from computer and video games.
  • RPG Maker 95 (32×32)
• TomeTik: Free (CC BY 3.0) tiles originally created for Angband, by David E. Gervais (32×32, 54×54).
• ZDoom Forums: Resources thread.
  • Dynamo’s One-Stop Resources Shop: Ripped resources from various first-person shooters.
  • HD Modern Game Rips: Weapon sprites.
  • Textures/Sprites/Sounds: Mega.nz folder with game rips, mostly first-person shooters.

Textures & Photos

• The Art Institute of Chicago: Public domain artworks.
• CC0 Textures: Free PBR textures.
• British Library: Free high-quality photos from the collections of the British Library.
• Library of Congress: The library’s digital collections that are free to use and reuse.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Open-access photos of art and objects.
• National Library of Ireland: Largest collection of Irish printed, manuscript, and visual material in the world.
• New York Public Library: Digital collection of more than 180,000 public domain items.
• Render96: Abandonware texture CDs.
• State Library of New South Wales: Free photos related to Australian history, culture, and literature.
• Texture Haven: Free CC0-licenced 8k PBR textures.
• Unsplash: Freely-usable images.

3D Rendering & Models

• 3D Models CC0: Public domain 3D model library.
• NASA 3D Resources: Models of spacecrafts and various textures.
• poly.pizza: Over 7100 free low poly models.
• Ray Tracing with POV-Ray: Rendering 25 scenes in 25 days.

Fonts

• Bitmap Fonts: Collection of bitmap fonts pulled from demo scene archives.
• Online Commodore 64 charset logo generator.
• GNU Unifont: free bitmap font with large Unicode coverage, including the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
• Kitchen Sink: monospaced font for general use with additional special characters for drawing artwork with your text.
• The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack: Collection of vintage BIOS and other system fonts.
• UNSCII: bitmapped Unicode font for blocky graphics.

Sound & Music

• Free Music Archive: Free downloads under Creative Commons and other licences.
• Orchestra Shortcuts 2020: Free compilation of 10 short orchestra sound effects, melodies, and background loops for your game or movie, by Timothy Corpus.
• ProTracker 2 (v2.3D) clone in C using SDL 2.
• sfxr: Basic sound effects generator.
• Video Game Music Preservation Foundation Wiki: Audio rips from old games.

Editors & Tools

• Tiled: Free platform-independent 2D map editor.
• Online RPG Tools: Various pseudo-random name and world generators.

Programming Languages

Source Code

• 101 Python Computer Games: David H. Ahl’s 101 BASIC Computer Games translated into Python with VT100 terminal effects.
• BASIC Computer Games: Updated version of the Basic Computer Games book, with well-written examples in a variety of common programming languages.
• Cymon’s Games: Repository of C/C++ programs inspired by old type-in programs.
• Games by Example: A collection of Python 3 source code for simple, text-based games & simulations to use as example programs.
• Games on GitHub: Open source games and game-related projects that are hosted on GitHub.
• Video Game Preservation: Archive of commercial video game source code.

3D Programming

• Flipcode: Archive of articles on 3D geometry, OpenGL, raytracing, voxel space, network programming.
• Quaternions: Introduction to quaternions and rotations in 3D.
• Rotations with quaternions

2.5D & 3D Engines

• Anarch: The suckless FPS game (uses ray casting).
• ioquake3: Advanced id Tech 3 engine, based on Quake III (GNU GPL).
• Irrlicht: Platform-independent 3D engine written in C++, with D3D, OpenGL, WebGL, and software renderers, 2D GUI system, dynamic lights and shadows, and a great variety of supported model and map formats.
• Ken Silverman’s BUILD2 engine.
• LAB3D/SDL: Port of Ken’s Labyrinth to modern operating systems, using OpenGL.
• qengine: Cross-platform retro game engine, fork of the Quake II code base (GNU GPL).

OpenGL

Articles & Tutorials

• Common Mistakes in OpenGL.
• Fundamental OpenGL tutorials and notes in C++.
• Introduction to OpenGL and GLSL.
• OpenGL 1.4 Tutorials: Using the legacy OpenGL fixed-function rendering pipeline.
• TinyGL: A small, free and fast subset of OpenGL.

Bindings

• CmdlineGL: Library for OpenGL 1.4 API access from Bash.

DirectX

• Ye Olde Game Programming with DirectX Tutorial (1997 – 2001).

Physics

Libraries

• Chipmunk2D: Simple, lightweight, fast and portable 2D rigid body physics library written in C.
• Physac: Header-only 2D physics module written in C, intended to be used with raylib, but works stand-alone.

Articles

• Designing a Physics Engine: Well-written tutorial for C++.

Networks

• Miniboa: Asynchronous, single-threaded, poll-based Telnet server for Multi-User Dungeons.
• telnetlib3: Telnet client and server library for Python 3.

Interactive Fiction & MUDs

• Mudlet: Modern cross-platform MUD client.

Free Books

• 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development.
• Code the Classics (Volume 1): Programming classic games with Python and Pygame Zero (source code).
• Designing Arcade Computer Game Graphics.
• Designing Virtual Worlds, by Richard Bartle.
• Game Programming Patterns: About design patterns in computer games (ECS, …).
• Computer Graphics and Computer Animation: Historical development of computer graphics.
• Computer Graphics from Scratch: Free online book on basic raytracing and triangle rasterisation, by Gabriel Gambetta.
• Program Arcade Games with Python and Pygame, by Paul Vincent Craven.

Wikis

• Chess Programming Wiki: Development of chess engines.
• LibreGameWiki: Free/Open-Source gaming encyclopedia.
• LifeWiki: The wiki for Conway’s Game of Life and other cellular automata.
• Rogue Basin: Roguelike development community.

Communities

• FreeGameDev Forums: Open Source game development.
• TIGSource Forums: Hobbyist and indie game developer community.
• SdlBasic Forum: Community around the SdlBasic interpreter.
• SpieleProgrammierer.de: German forum.

News

• Indie Retro News: New retro, remake, and demake releases.

Releases & Showcases

• Awesome TTY Games: Text-based Unix games.
• DOS Haven: Modern and new games for DOS.
• Open Source Game Clones: Remakes of great old games.

Game Jams & Competitions

• The 7DRL Challenge: Annual 7-day-roguelike development competition.
• The Interactive Fiction Competition: Annual celebration of new, text-driven digital games.
• Game Jams on itchio.io.

History

• 50 Years of Text Games: History of text-based computer games.
• The CRPG Book Project: Sharing the history of Computer Role-Playing Games.
• The Cutting Room Floor: Site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games.
• Games That Weren’t: Cancelled, prototype and unreleased games archive for consoles and computers.
• GDC Classic Game Postmortem: Retrospects on game development (YouTube).
• The Giant List of Classic Game Programmers (since 1992).
• The Rise and Fall of the Hobbyist Game Programmer: On game development in the home computer era.
• RPG Maker: History & Games.