Become a cracked product engineer today
Ship fast. Fix fast. Speed is everything. Someone reports a bug. You fix it in 2 minutes. Not 2 hours. Not tomorrow. Right now. This is not about talent. This is about urgency. You have to feel it. Th
Tiger's Place
Tiger's Place
Latest posts
Bipedal, humanoid, and the words for creature shapes in games
Bipedal vs quadrupedal: how many legs This is about the number of legs the creature walks on. Bipedal. Two legs. Humans, ostriches, T-rex, kangaroos, most fantasy humanoids. Quadrupedal. Four legs. Do
Lerp and smoothstep, what they actually do
Intro You hear "lerp" and "smoothstep" everywhere in game dev. They sound like math jargon. They're not. Both are small tools that do the same job: smoothly move from one value to another. The problem
IK and FK, what they actually are
What is Kinematics Kinematics is the math field. It's the study of how things move without worrying about forces (which would be dynamics). FK and IK are the two branches: forward kinematics and inver
How to make your textures fast on the GPU
Intro Textures are usually the biggest cost in a 3D scene. Memory, bandwidth, and load time all get eaten by them. Resizing them is the obvious lever. There's more. This post is about the less obvious
Convex hulls and why they matter for collision
The problem: collision is everywhere in games Every game has to answer one question over and over: did this thing touch that thing? Did the bullet hit the enemy? Did the player land on the platform? D
Juice is the difference between a game that feels alive and one that doesn't
Intro Think back to the last game you played that felt good. What happened when you jumped? Did the camera move a little? Did your character squish for a moment before launching? What happened when yo
Just write your own libraries
Just write your own libraries Libraries used to limit what you could do. If nothing fit your needs, you had to settle or slowly create it yourself. Now, that's changed. AI models are advanced enough f
Your game runs fine on desktop. Why does it crash on mobile?
Intro You built a game on the web. It runs at 60 fps on your laptop. You open it on your phone and it stutters, overheats, or just crashes. Same code, same scene, completely different result. This pos
Redis is great
Introduction I've used Redis for a lot of things over the years. Rate limiting, caching, distributed locking, tracking peak concurrency, ephemeral counters, queues, deduplication, leaderboards. Every
Decals in games are not talked about enough
What a decal is A decal is a flat texture stuck onto an existing 3D surface. It doesn't add new geometry. It just paints something on top of what's already there. Bullet hole on a concrete wall? Decal
2D Rendering Concepts: A Reference
1. The Core Insight: 2D Is 3D With a Flat Camera A modern 2D game is rendered by a 3D engine. Every sprite is a flat rectangle (a quad) in 3D space. Every tile is a quad. Every UI element is a quad. T
2D Asset Primitives: A Reference
1. Sprite A 2D image with transparency, drawn in the world with a transform. A sprite is the atomic unit of 2D games. The image data is just a PNG. What makes it a sprite is how it's used: positioned
Skinning and Why Smooth Weights Matter
Introduction You know what a 3D mesh is. You know what a skeleton is. There is a thing in the middle that connects them. That thing is skinning. And it makes or breaks how a character looks when it mo
How spatial audio works in games
Introduction A while ago I started wondering how games make sound feel like it's coming from a real place. Like in Counter-Strike when you can hear someone walking through a room two corridors over, o
A visual guide to voxels
What's a voxel? A voxel is to 3D what a pixel is to 2D. A pixel is a tiny square in a 2D image. A grid of pixels makes a picture. Your screen is a grid of pixels. Zoom into any photo and you see them.
Does my KTX2 texture need to be square?
Introduction I hit an error like this: KTX2 texture decoded to 512x286, which is incompatible with block size 4x4 I assumed the texture needed to be square (width = height). That was wrong. Where the
Indirect draws in WebGPU and why they're so powerful
Indirect draws in WebGPU 1. The two kinds of passes Every frame, CPU records commands grouped into passes. Two kinds matter here. Render pass = pixels come out. Runs the standard graphics pipeline: V
Trigonometry for game devs, starting from zero
Introduction This guide assumes you know nothing. We're starting from the actual beginning. By the end, you'll understand what trig is, why it matters for games, and you'll know the handful of formula
Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) and why they are cool
First, what problem are we even solving? Before we talk about SDFs, let's talk about how 3D graphics normally work. Take a round ball in any video game. Looks smooth, right? It's not. If you zoom in c