Game Dev Canon — write-ups

The "Game Dev Mastery" course as write-ups: read it on your phone, go in order or jump around. Every page gives context, the mechanism, an analogy, links to other topics and "questions worth asking". Hands-on work (labs) is marked 🏠 at home — that part you do at your desktop machine.

✦ 54 write-ups 🏠 15 labs — at home

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Modules 1–7

History and foundations

How the industry got where it is: arcades → consoles → 3D → MMOs → HD/indie → mobile/F2P → the present. Play it, take it apart, read the postmortems.

1. The arcade era1970–85

Game loop (+lab), hardware/fixed-point, collision, ghost AI — done. Next up: the rest of the arcade classics.✦ open

2. Console Wars1985–93

Cartridges and mappers, genres crystallizing, the controller and input, SNES Mode 7 (pseudo-3D + lab).✦ open

3. The 3D revolution1993–99

Doom (2.5D, BSP) and Quake (true 3D: PVS, lightmaps). History × classic CS.✦ open

4. Online Worlds / MMO1997–05

Netcode taxonomy (three models + a lag lab), rollback (GGPO), persistence and sharding (EVE TiDi), virtual economies (Bartle, Castronova).✦ open

5. The HD era and indie2005–12

Engines (Unity/Unreal/Godot), PBR rendering (+lab), Steam and visibility, indie production. Whole module.✦ open

6. Mobile / F2P2012–18

Retention (D1/D7/D30), gacha and battle passes, telemetry/A-B testing, privacy (GDPR/ATT). Whole module.✦ open

7. The modern era2018–26

VR/AR as it actually is, the cloud (a feature, not a product), industry economics (contraction/consolidation). Whole module.✦ open

Modules 8–9

Engineering and design

The reference layer: engines, rendering, networking, audio, ECS — and game design theory: MDA, flow, game feel.

8. Technical Deep Divesreference

Render pipeline, mesh shaders/Nanite, job systems, audio/DSP, ECS — performance and parallelism under the hood. Whole module.✦ open

9. Game design theorytheory

MDA and loops, flow and difficulty, level design, player psychology, game feel — the craft where ML is usually NOT the answer. Whole module.✦ open

Module 10

Business and monetization

Distribution, the monetization spectrum (ethical → predatory), studio economics, case studies.

10. Business & Monetizationbusiness

Distribution and visibility, studio economics (hit-driven, burn/runway), the monetization spectrum from ethical to predatory, F2P unit economics. Whole module.✦ open

Module 11 ★

AI / ML in games

Your home turf. From pathfinding and tree search to LLM NPCs and world models — 9 topics, 4 labs. And the question running through all of it: when is ML NOT the answer.

11. AI/ML in Gamesspecialized

Classical AI and search (minimax/MCTS), RL and "when ML is not the answer", PCG/noise, LLM NPCs, world models. 9 topics + 4 labs 🏠.✦ open

Module 12

Capstone and synthesis

Assembling the patterns into a project. Project E (LLM NPC) or your own.

12. Capstone & Synthesiscapstone

How to run the capstone (Novgorod), synthesis of the patterns that cross gamedev↔ML, postmortem. The end of the course. Whole module.✦ open

The whole course: 12 modules · 54 lessons · 15 interactive labs. Classical AI is for control, modern AI is for content, and maturity is knowing when the tool is NOT the answer. Full text lives in the Game Dev Mastery Course/ folder. Static site on Vercel, reads fine on a phone.