GPU Texture Caching ⚙️, Jonathan Blow Engine 🎮, Indie Dev Lessons 👨💻
🎨 Rendering & Shading Tricks
Fixing Black Lambert Shadows: A Silly Little Shading Trick
Classic Lambert shading makes half your model vanish into black when you’re testing with a single light and no textures. This post introduces a tiny one-line hack: remap the N·L term from [-1, 1] to [0, 1], then square it, preserving smooth gradients on shadowed areas while staying close to Lambert in lit regions. The author shows this “silly” trick is actually the exact Hermite interpolation matching Lambert’s value and slope at key points. It’s a cheap, great-looking diffuse model for prototypes, tech demos, and stylized scenes.
From 30fps to 60fps: Mastering GPU Texture Caching
Your fragment shaders might be bottlenecked not by math, but by terrible texture access patterns. This guide walks through registers, L1/L2 caches, and VRAM, showing how cache lines, warps, and coalesced access determine whether a texel fetch costs 30 cycles or 500+. It reframes mipmaps as a critical cache optimization and shows when to use explicit LOD and mip bias. With practical examples like ORM packing and reducing dependent reads, it gives you concrete tricks to gain 20–40% in real-world game shaders.
🧠 Design, Engines & Long-Term Craft
Inside Jonathan Blow’s 10‑Year Puzzle Epic and Custom Engine
Jonathan Blow opens up about spending nearly a decade—and tens of millions of dollars—building his new puzzle epic, Order of the Sinking Star. He explains why he ditched C++ to create his own language and engine, how a five‑artist team achieved the game’s intricate 3D look, and why he finally chose to work with a publisher. Along the way, he shares frank advice on pricing, Steam vs consoles, and surviving as an indie in the noisy 2026 market.
Ship Faster, Sell Smarter: Indie Game Dev Takeaways from 2025
Matt Hackett wraps 2025 with a dense bundle of indie game dev insights, from rapid shipping tactics and “webbiness” game design to wishlist-boosting marketing strategies. He shares how he landed a publisher, why smart localization might dramatically grow your audience, and what he learned on the ground at GDC 2025. The piece closes on a hopeful note: there’s still funding, room for indies to win, and every reason to aim to ship in 2026.