Handmade Hero's new lessons about old-school game programming

I&#x27;ve been watching this religiously since it started. I manage to catch almost all the episodes live, and there&#x27;s a great set of people on the Twitch&#x2F;IRC chat as well. (I&#x27;m &quot;nxsy&quot; on there.)<p>I also wrote a Linux platform layer for it for fun [1] and for those who were skeptical about Casey&#x27;s approach to portability (and there are a few people who pitch up who are&#x2F;were aggressive about his choice of starting platform and&#x2F;or his approach).<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/nxsy/xcb_handmade" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nxsy&#x2F;xcb_handmade</a>

I&#x27;ve been following his stream and it&#x27;s fantastic. I wouldn&#x27;t say it&#x27;s just about old-school game programming; It&#x27;s more like full stack game development. No math libraries or pre-built components are used. Everything is done from scratch, in C.<p>Some of the architecture patterns are actually quite relevant for web development, especially the earlier lessons on decoupling the game layer from the platform layer.

I have been enjoying the stream a lot, thanks to HN community since I learned about it here when it was starting.<p>Aside from the game development angle, the host has his own strong opinions on programming in general that are quite unconventional, I do not agree with some but they are interesting nonetheless.<p>And in general, it&#x27;s fascinating seeing programmer with 20 years of experience and which obviously loves his work teaching his craft.

This stream is fantastic even if you&#x27;re not, or do not aspire to be, a game programmer. I find it interesting to watch someone&#x27;s thought process as they flesh out their ideas and make something out of nothing.

<i>&quot;If everyone in the next generation of game developers decides to use a pre-fab engine, who will be left to make the new engines?&quot;</i><p>Implementing low-level systems yourself is a valuable exercise for games as much as for any other software. You gain new appreciation for the things you took for granted, and pre-made abstractions become even more intuitive because you feel more in control of what&#x27;s (probably) going on under the hood. One of my pet projects is implementing graphics primitives in software - you&#x27;d be surprised at the amount of tuning and iterations needed to make them fast, clear, and correct.

I&#x27;ve been working with UE4 since april on a personal project of mine (fps).<p>While there are layers of abstraction over all of this that I enjoy, I debate really how important it is for me as a game developer to worry about them.<p>In the old-school days the role of engine developer and game developer were the same.<p>Now I see there are two disciplines. Those that enjoy making video games and those that enjoy making video game engines.

It is a good tutorial. But do take it with a pinch of salt, b&#x2F;c I have already seen some zealots defending this as religion of writing games from scratch as something easy and achievable in short time. It is time consuming and takes lots of practice and tweaking even for seasoned game developer.<p>And most importantly, if you want to deliver a complete game as single developer&#x2F;designer, doing it from scratch is probably the wrong path to take. You would have to wear so many other hats besides just game programming.<p>But if you want to build renderers and learn the craft of rendering stuff in low level. Or you are doing as a hobby without intention to deliver a complete game with rich content, then this tutorial is good for ya!

I just discovered this about a week ago, and am only a few videos into it (Day 006), but it&#x27;s been great so far. Like a some people have pointed out, Casey has some strong opinions about things that I don&#x27;t completely agree with, but I&#x27;ve already learned a lot, and it&#x27;s really cool to see the thought process of someone who is clearly very smart and has a lot of experience doing this sort of thing.<p>On a side note, it&#x27;s also pretty cool just watching him work in emacs. I just started learning emacs myself and he&#x27;s wicked fast!

I hadn&#x27;t seen this before, but now I&#x27;ve subscribed to the youtube channel so I can watch the videos as I get time. This entire project sounds amazing :).

When i think of old school game programming I think of programming in assembly directly onto a ROM chip.