This is one of those things that newbie game programmers seem to underestimate, frequently.
And when I say “newbie” I include “experienced, skilled programmers with 10+ years of coding experience – but who haven’t yet shipped a game of their *own*”.
(e.g. I’ve seen a couple of studios that started as Digital Agencies, or as Animation Studios, etc – that then transitioned to writing their own games. This is the kind of thing that they often struggle with. Not for lack of skill or general programming experience, but for lack of the domain-specific experience of game coding)

This is the story of Candystall, the winner of the Assembly 2007 4k intro competition. In this article, we describe the ideas that eventually led to the intro as it came to be, and the tools we created along the way to assist in the process.

About 8 or ten years ago I started thinking about doing a graphics demo for the demo scene. I started to prepare a minimum skeleton that should compile to the smallest possible exe. Over the years I kept this Skeleton alive going from Windows XP to Windows 7 and from DirectX 8 to DirectX 10.
More than three years ago I put the source code up on Google Code here and kept updating it:

This is my little space for tutorials, papers and code for computer graphics, fractals and demoscene. I don't store the demos and other finalized works here anymore, I moved them to the vanilla page. Also, if you are looking for something and you don't find it here, go try my main site, perhapse you have more luck there. The content in this site have been written in the last ten years or more, and you can imagine it continues growing and growing. Yep, I try my best to upload the new material and keep it all up to date, but it's not easy since both the content of everything you see here and the site itself are made during my spare time. Also, note I'm neither native English speaker nor I do really spend long time writing the text.... so I'm really sorry for that. Yet I hope you enjoy it!

Immer mehr Web-Seiten binden die Gefällt-Mir-Buttons von Facebook, Google+ und Twitter ein; auch bei heise online stand das auf der Todo-Liste. Allerdings werden durch diese Buttons schon beim Laden der Seite – also ganz ohne dass der Anwender etwas dazu tut – Daten an die Betreiber der Netzwerkplattformen übertragen. Die enthalten neben der URL der aktuellen Seite unter anderem eine Kennung, die zumindest bei dort angemeldeten Nutzern direkt mit einer Person verknüpft ist. Facebook & Co können also komplette Surfprofile ihrer Nutzer erstellen; Details dazu erklärt der Artikel Das Like-Problem. Da dies mit unseren Vorstellungen von Datenschutz und Privatspäre nicht vereinbar ist, hat heise online eine zweistufige Lösung entworfen, die nur mit Zustimmung der Anwender Daten übermittelt.

SharpDX is intended to be used as an alternative managed DirectX framework. The API is generated automatically from DirectX SDK headers, with AnyCpu target, meaning that you can run your application on x86 and x64 platform, without recompiling your project or installing assemblies into the GAC. SharpDX is also the fastest Managed-DirectX implementation.

When I started programming many of the elements we take for granted now, did not exist. There was no DirectX and not many compatible libs were available for the free compilers of the day. So I had to write my own code for most basic programs, keyboard handlers, mouse handlers, video memory accessors, rasterizers, texture mappers, blitters… the programs I wrote then were 100% my own code and I had to be able to handle anything and everything.

Personally I’ve always been interested in what was going on under the hood so this suited me just fine. I always dug into the details and I almost always end up programming as close to the bone ON the hardware (or OS) as I possibly can both to eek out as much performance as possible AND to satisfy my own hunger for knowledge.

Goal of the IN4K site is to be the central resource about creation of 4 KB intros.
We hope to compile public domain resources into a single site, as well as mirror them incase of website closures or downtime.

I'm reading Do More Faster, which is more than a bit of an advertisement for the TechStars start-up incubator, but it's a good read nonetheless. What struck me is that several of the people who went through the program, successfully enough to at least get initial funding, didn't know how to program. They learned it so they could implement their start-up ideas.

I'm primarily a server programmer, but I still end up doing UI work every once in a while, and that's been true for the majority of the last three weeks. Not being an experienced old hand at UI design, I find myself falling back on first principles and decade-old books. I'm mostly happy with the results, but the code that results in implementing the interface... well, it's not the kind of code that I like to write.

Programming is hard. It's harder than you think. Right now you're probably underestimating the amount of frustration and discomfort you're about to experience, without realizing that by doing so you're creating all sorts of subtle barriers to obtaining a deep understanding of programming.

What’s on this page? I’m interested in producing complexity out of simple parts. This page contains bookmarks that I collected while working on games; I did not write most of the content linked from here. As a result the set of links here reflects the types of things I needed to know: only a few specific topics (not everything related to game programming), general ideas instead of platform-specific information (graphics, sound, compilers), and ideas and designs instead of source code (I find it easier to go from an idea to code than from code to an idea). Other sites, like Gamedev and Gamasutra, cover lots more topics than mine does. These are the topics I cover:

Making games run faster is a pet topic of mine. Code samples are too specific to help many people, so here are some general principles I’ve learned.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the JS1K demo contest. The goal is to do something neat in 1 kilobyte of JavaScript code.

I couldn't resist making one myself, so I pulled out my bag of tricks from my Winamp music visualization days and started coding. I'm really happy with how it turned out

As programmers we’re continually accused of doing a sloppy job. There are countless programs in the wild, crashing, locking up and accidentally writing “I am a fish” a million times over someone’s mid-term essay. The effect? Something like this: This damn computer and excel r fuckin my life up! Hatin life right now – MissAlauren (and everyone else at one time or another) It’s experiences like this that cause people to rant about Microsoft and curse the anonymous programmers who suddenly (yet inevitably) betrayed them. We all know this; it’s burned into our very souls by countless hours of tech support provided to family and friends. Time after time we see that programmers who do quick, sloppy work make other people suffer. And so we try, we try so damn hard not to be like that. We try to be the good programmer who checks every return value and handles every exception.

Diese Website ergänzt das Buch »Generative Gestaltung« (erschienen im Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz, 2009) und bietet direkten Zugriff auf alle Processing-Quellcodes der im Buch beschriebenen Programme.

Im Buch »Generative Gestaltung« geht es darum, wie Bilder mittels Code erzeugt werden können. Ein Bild wird also nicht mehr »von Hand« geschaffen, sondern dadurch, dass eine visuelle Idee in ein Regelwerk übersetzt und dann in einer Programmiersprache in Form eines Quellcodes umgesetzt wird. Die Folge ist, dass ein solches Programm nicht nur ein einzelnes Bild erzeugen kann, sondern dass durch Veränderung von Parametern ganze Bilderwelten entstehen.