3 HN users recommended this tutorial3 months2017–2021score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN recommends the series as a thorough look at low-level game programming by someone with deep knowledge, offered free.
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.
“the amount of knowledge and experience on-show was incredible” (HN, 2020)
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]
Free spare-time project showing incredible knowledge and dedication
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]
Live-coded game from scratch with real gems despite questionable style
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.
Thorough, interesting series with a decent C introduction for game dev
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
3 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more