🔗 Neat Shader Tricks, The Future of Graphics APIs, and Other Links It’s been a while since I did a links round up–here’s the cool stuff I read/watched over the past few months! #gamedev #indiedev gamesbymason.com/devlog/2026/...

Many programmers consider Vulkan to be overly complex–maybe not even worth engaging with as an #indiedev. It’s easy to see why people feel this way. If this is how you Vulkan, or modern graphics APIs in general, the goal of this talk is to change your mind. gamesbymason.com/blog/2026/vu...

"I Fixed Windows Native Development" Cool script for installing the VS SDK/toolchain without going through Microsoft's installers. marler8997.github.io/blog/fixed-w...

🪟 Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable gamesbymason.com/blog/2026/mi...

🔉 Statically Linking PipeWire I recently helped @tuple.app solve an interesting problem. On #Linux, Static binaries are easier to ship, but PipeWire expects dynamic linking. To solve this, I've open sourced a static build of PipeWire. Read more below. gamesbymason.com/blog/2025/st...

that feeling when you’re about to have a text renderer, but not yet

🔗 Prototype Progress, Monthly Links, & Zig Turns 10 I've been busy wrapping up the prototype of my next game, but I set aside some time for my link roundup. This thread is a summary + screenshots, scroll down for hyperlinks--not my preference, social media sites don't want you to leave. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🖼️ Stop Shipping PNGs In Your Games Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach. gamesbymason.com/blog/2025/st... #gamedev #indiedev

Do I know anyone who’s an expert on HDR that would be down to answer a few questions over DM?

"Renting is for Suckers" andrewkelley.me/post/renting...

Steamle.com - Guess the number of Steam reviews My results for Day 7 🟩🟩🟨🟩🟨 400/500

🔗 June Links - Wolfire vs Steam, Indie vs AAA, What Does ‘Content Creator’ mean anyway? #gamedev #indiedev gamesbymason.com/devlog/2025/...

As part of my shader library, I've been playing with Voronoi Noise and Voronoi Diagrams. #gamedev #indiedev #shaders

Playing with noise #gamedev #indiedev

My friend's game, give it a try!

📅 May Links I'm doing a new thing where I share my favorite links at the end of each month on my site, you can read May's links here. #gamedev #indiedev gamesbymason.com/devlog/2025/...

🌴 What I Learned from Staying Inside Chris Zukowski holds an online conference "Staying Inside" on game marketing every year. I wrote up some notes. Multiple speakers touched on a shift happening in game funding that may be of interest even if you aren’t looking for funding... #gamedev #indiedev

Portland based and interested in Zig? We're putting together a hang out! Details TBD. zig.day/usa/portland/

A couple of weeks ago while working on the beta release of my ECS, I noticed my command buffer abstraction was slow. It turns out I was assuming the optimizer could do a few things it couldn’t. The fix wasn’t all that interesting, but how do you catch this sort of mistake? #gamedev #indiedev

Mason is incredibly smart and was one of the first people to encourage me to make my own engine - highly recommend subscribing to their newsletter if you love zig, game engines, game architecture, etc

Interested in game design, game engines, and the business of indie games? Tired of scrolling social media to search for content worth your time? Sign up for my newsletter to receive regular writing on game development. #gamedev #indiedev gamesbymason.com/newsletter/

I’m writing a new game engine in #Zig, and I’m open sourcing each module as I write it. Today I released the beta version of my entity component system ZCS, I’ll consider it a beta until I’ve shipped my next Steam game using it. #gamedev #indiedev #ECS gamesbymason.com/blog/2025/zcs/

If you apply this normalization approximation repeatedly, it converges IFF the initial magnitude is (~-2.24, 2.24). Outside that range, it diverges. This is easy to verify empirically, but I'm not a good enough mathematician to prove it. If you are let me know how you did it! 😜 #gamedev #math

Floating point division is slow, and square root is slower. What if I told you that you could approximate 1/sqrt(x) as y = -0.5x + 1.5? #gamedev #indiedev #math

Fun bit of easing trivia–if you look up most library’s implementations of "easeOutBounce" and such, they make this bizarre use of the post-decrement operator... #gamedev #indiedev

Linear interpolation is convenient, but boring. If only there was an easy way to stylize linear motion without storing a bunch of extra state... #gamedev #indiedev

Quick performance tip. If you’re comfortable requiring support for FMA3 (Intel & AMD CPUs have had it for the last 13 years!) you should probably be using your language’s fused multiply add intrinsic where relevant.

Since shipping my indie puzzle game Way of Rhea last year I’ve been hard at work on game two, but I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like.