Handmade Hero Day 001 - Setting Up the Windows Build
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends the series as a thorough look at low-level game programming by someone with deep knowledge, offered free.
What it is
Day 1 of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, a live-coded game built from scratch in C on Windows. It reviews C on Windows, sets up a minimal build system and WinMain entry point, and shows a first MessageBox.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2017 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec thorin · 2020-09 · on “Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?”
After watching the first few weeks of Handmade Hero [1] I realised my idea of hard work and dedication was different to a lot of people I was trying to emulate. Doing this as a spare time, free project and the amount of knowledge and experience on-show was incredible [1] [this video]
Recommends w0utert · 2017-06 · on “Compiler Optimizations are Awesome”
Handmade hero [1] mostly, and sometimes Jonathan Blow's compiler programming streams [2]. Not all of these video's are equally interesting, but there's some real gems in there, e.g. where Casey (of HH) hand-optimizes his bilinear bitmap interpolation code (somewhere between streams ~115 and ~120 if I remember correctly). I cringe a lot about their coding style and complete disregard of architecture and basic code hygiene they appear to have, but there's still a lot of interesting things to learn from watching these streams. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]
Recommends agentultra · 2021-10 · on “Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)”
It's hard for me to recall how I learned because my first "game" I wrote was in '89 and I wasn't very old at the time. Maybe check out [this video] -- I've watched a fair bit of it and many folks agree it's thorough and interesting. If you don't know C already he has a decent introduction as well. Maybe not the best place to learn C but it suits well enough for game development projects. The nice thing I find with C is that bringing life back to older machines is definitely possible -- the homebrew scene for various old consoles is very much alive and well and there's probably a C compiler that targets it.