Game Math 🧮, Phaser 4 🚀, Spherical Harmonics 🔮
🎮 Game Dev Craft & UX Polish
Stop Sprinkling Epsilons Everywhere: Writing Robust Game Math
Most game devs learn “never compare floats for equality” and reach for arbitrary epsilons, but this post shows why that habit often creates more bugs than it fixes. Through concrete examples—grid movement, slerp, vector length, ray-box tests, convex hulls—it demonstrates cleaner, more robust alternatives that frequently rely on exact comparisons or better algorithms. It also highlights when epsilons actually make sense, like sanitizing noisy user data or writing tests. If you care about stable physics, geometry, or rendering, this is essential reading.
Seven Tiny UX Tweaks That Make Your Game Feel Pro
A solo dev walks through seven small UX upgrades that quietly transform a basic incremental game into something that feels professional. You’ll see why animated menus, proper volume and display settings, clever keyboard shortcuts, and sound pitch randomization matter more than you think. The video also covers practical accessibility touches like auto-clickers and locale-aware number formatting.
🧠 Engines & Massive-Scale Tech
Inside Titan: Supercell’s Secret Mobile-First Engine Powering 300M Players
Supercell has quietly built Titan, a proprietary mobile-first engine that now powers every one of its games for 300 million monthly users. Designed specifically for phones, Titan targets everything from cutting-edge flagships to the “cheapest, oldest Android handset” still running Clash Royale. By specializing in mobile, Supercell avoids many of the optimization headaches seen in Unity and Unreal, enabling advanced backend rendering (as in Mo.co) and custom 3D compression tech. The studio is finally talking about Titan as it hires engineers for this “genuinely unusual” work.
Is DLSS5 Neural Rendering or Just a Smarter Photoshop?
A veteran rendering engineer dissects what DLSS5 might be doing under the hood and why it matters strategically for developers. By studying screenshots, they infer a restrained U‑Net/transformer that uses g-buffers and final frames to apply precise, AO-like and BRDF tweaks while strictly respecting original geometry. The environmental lighting gains are subtle, but the improvements on faces—skin detail, eye highlights, better shading—are genuinely impressive.
💡 Rendering, Lighting & Visual Fidelity
Phaser 4 Is Here: Massive 2D WebGL Upgrade for JS Game Devs
Phaser 4 has arrived, delivering the biggest update yet to the popular open source JavaScript/TypeScript 2D framework. A completely rewritten node-based WebGL renderer powers new GPU layers that can push a million sprites and huge tilemaps in single draw calls. A unified Filter system brings a suite of built-in effects, alongside improved lighting, shaders, and tint controls. The release also ships “AI Agent Skills” files so coding assistants can deeply understand Phaser 4 and help migrate from v3.
Taming Spherical Harmonics: Practical Lighting, Cubemaps, and Deringing for Games
Spherical harmonics are everywhere in modern game lighting, but most intros are buried in math. This article walks you from first principles to working JS code that projects cube maps into SH, reconstructs lighting, and verifies orthonormality via Monte Carlo. It explains why SH approximations ring, why you get negative “light,” and how to fix it with frequency-space deringing. You’ll also see how engines like Frostbite use low-order SH for compact, normal-aware lightmaps.