Top all-time · #226
Amit Patel
Personal blog · redblobgames.com · on HN as amitpgamesprogrammingmath
Amit Patel writes Red Blob Games: latest blog posts, a personal blog at redblobgames.com about games, programming and math. Since 2012, 203 different Hacker News readers have linked it 330 times, most often “Hexagonal Grids (2013)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 27 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Amit Patel's Red Blob Games for its interactive, visual explanations of hex grids, A* pathfinding and game-related maths, and recommend the site as a whole.
- Recommended for · 27 comments
- Called well-written, comprehensive and interactive; the hex grid and A* pages are named as the best explanations.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Interactive tutorials for math and algorithms
Most-linked posts?
- Hexagonal Grids (2013)42 people · 44 mentions · first linked 2018-01-13
- Red Blob Games: Interactive visual explanations of math and algorithms25 people · 31 mentions · first linked 2017-10-05
- Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014)18 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2018-01-19
- Introduction to A*14 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2014-07-20
- Hexagonal grids for games12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2013-05-09
- Red Blob Games8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2014-07-29
- Field of View with Interactive Real-time Examples (2012)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2012-07-12
- Making maps with noise functions (2022)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-11-01
- Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-01-02
- /articles/visibility/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-05-15
What Hacker News says?
For those looking for more interactive content like this, albeit with more of a game dev focus, I highly recommend https://www.redblobgames.com One of my favorite articles is this one on hex grids: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ it blew my mind the first time I noticed that all the interactions and code change when you toggle between "flat topped" and "pointy topped".
Comment linking /grids/hexagons/
on “Sound”Submitted Hexagonal grids for games as a story · 709 points
HN discussionSimilar ones: - https://www.redblobgames.com/ - https://ncase.me/
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on “GPS”Submitted Introduction to A* as a story · 509 points
HN discussionCool visualization for your personal logbook. How is the raw or display data stored? The globe map reminds me of this hexagonal grid article from my bookmarks I’d found on here or reddit. https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ As an airline pilot, I am curious, have you watched the season 2 of Nathan Fielder’s Rehearsal on HBO, that comically addresses the topic of pilot-copilot communication? If so what are y…
Comment linking /grids/hexagons/
on “Show HN: I'm an airline pilot – I built interactive graphs/globes of my flights”Submitted Everything you ever wanted to know about hexagonal grids as a story · 462 points
HN discussionthe other visualizations on setosa.io are pretty great. There really aren't enough of these around if you ask me. another set of good tutorials that are at this level is Red Blob Games: http://www.redblobgames.com/ focused on games but introduces math/coding concepts very intuitively and in a practical manner.
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on “Show HN: Markov chains explained visually”Submitted Hexagonal Grids (2013) as a story · 368 points
HN discussionHe's done great projects. http://www.redblobgames.com - he writes here too.
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on “Show HN: Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration”Submitted English: A vs. An as a story · 365 points
HN discussionThere's one about programming the hexagonal grids (eg. for the turn-based strategy games): https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/
Comment linking /grids/hexagons/
on “Let's Learn About Waveforms”Submitted Hexagonal Grids (2013) as a story · 337 points
HN discussionFor those that enjoy this style of article, Amit Patel's Red Blob Games site[0] has similarly well-written and interactive articles, mostly regarding pathfinding and map generation in games. He also wrote an article[1] about how he creates the interactive elements of these articles, and a lot of "background" information about the articles on redblobgames.com can be found on his other blog[2]. [0] https://www.redblob…
Comment linking /making-of/line-drawing/
on “Curves and Surfaces”Submitted Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014) as a story · 288 points
HN discussionhttps://www.redblobgames.com/ Amit Patel's blog, there's lots of game dev articles there and many of them have interactive demos
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on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Pathfinding for Tower Defense as a story · 264 points
HN discussionFor a slightly older audience, https://www.redblobgames.com/ has awesome interactive explanations. (But I'd say you probably want to be at least around 12 years old and interested in programming games to seriously benefit from them.)
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on “Mathematical games interesting to both you and a five-year-old child”Submitted Delaunay and Voronoi on a sphere as a story · 250 points
HN discussionIt was coded with JavaScript + ThreeJS and built on top of a custom entity component system. Lots of different parts to the game, each receiving different treatments; eg the terrain is built from a mix of voronoi cells, layered simplex noise, and poisson disc sampling. I found Amit Patel’s blog to be a great resource for this: https://www.redblobgames.com/
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on “Wayfinder – a relaxing 'art game' in the browser”Submitted Elevation Control as a story · 231 points
HN discussionThere are a lot of libraries in different languages that are sort of in a middle place between drag n drop engines and programming straight to a graphics API like Direct3d or Vulkan. You should look around for a popular one in a language that you're already comfortable with and read up on tutorials, documentation, and such first. For reference, the ones I used to love and seem to still be kicking were Phaser.js for…
Comment linking /grids/hexagons/
on “Game Programming Patterns (2014)”Submitted Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014) as a story · 202 points
HN discussionYou could also look into more general algorithm and data structure books, or into design books. https://www.redblobgames.com/ has lots of really nifty articles, too.
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on “Think Python, 3rd Edition”Submitted Introduction to A* (2014) as a story · 201 points
HN discussionYou might like https://www.redblobgames.com/
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on “Hacker News for Gamedev”Submitted Hexagonal Grids as a story · 174 points
HN discussionAh, then some useful algorithms and keywords to study would be OpenGL, voxel rendering, A* pathfinding, cellular autonoma, perlin noise, etc. Red Blob Games has a lot of good articles covering many of these subjects, here's a few: https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction... https://simblob.blogspot.com/search/label/noise
Comment linking /pathfinding/a-star/introduction.html
on “Microsoft open sources parts of Minecraft: Java Edition”Submitted Implementation of Hex Grids as a story · 174 points
HN discussionhttp://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/
Comment linking /grids/hexagons/
on “Data Structure Visualizations”Submitted Flow Field Pathfinding as a story · 165 points
HN discussion
