Under the Hood

Short reads about how our games actually work

Every game here has one system in it that is more interesting than it looks from the outside. A Moon that is calculated instead of stored. A replay that is neither a video nor your keystrokes. A monster deciding, sixty times a second, whether a shelf is between you and it.

These are short explanations of those systems, written for players rather than programmers. No jargon is assumed, and anything technical gets explained the first time it turns up. Pick whichever sounds interesting.

The articles

• Why a browser game can start in seconds
  What happens between clicking play and the first frame, and why having no engine to boot changes everything.
• How Moon Miner builds a Moon out of one number
  The world is never stored anywhere. One seed and a hash decide every rock and every ore vein the moment your drill arrives.
• Offline earnings with no server at all
  Cozy Fishing pays you for time away using one saved timestamp, one subtraction, and a cap that stops the maths from breaking.
• How Void Daggers replays your whole run
  Not a video and not your inputs, but a flipbook of positions twenty times a second, and the reason it had to be built that way.
• Why idle game numbers explode
  Costs multiply while damage adds, which is the entire difficulty curve, and eventually forces a number like 4.08e+12 onto the screen.
• Light against the dark: how Deepwick's light works
  One number is your health, your fuel and your eyesight, and the darkness is a black sheet with a soft hole erased through it.
• How a monster knows it can see you
  Line of sight in AISLE 7: a straight line walked across a grid of floor squares, what counts as cover, and the twist about what the monster already knows.