Top all-time · #2936
Red Blob Games: latest blog posts
Personal blog · simblob.blogspot.comgamesprogramming
Red Blob Games: latest blog posts is a personal blog at simblob.blogspot.com about games and programming. Since 2009, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 93 times, most often “Introduction to Hexagons, Part 2”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Amit Patel's game-dev blog, linked for interactive explainers on hex grids, pathfinding, map generation and noise, and for the author's notes on how the diagrams were built.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Behind the scenes - how I'm making redblobgames.com - interactive explanations of game development algorithms and math
Most-linked posts?
- Introduction to Hexagons, Part 25 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-11-02
- Improving island shaping for map generation, again2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-21
- Polygonal Map Generation, HTML5 Version2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-09-05
- Improving island shaping for map generation2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-03-02
- One Letter Variable Names2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-04
- My Personal Information Workflow2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-19
- /2007/07/interactive-illustrations.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-27
- Hexagon Conversions2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-01
- Procedural Tree Generator2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-06-09
- Connected Components2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-09
What Hacker News says?
For 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 /
on “Curves and Surfaces”Submitted Verb-Noun vs. Noun-Verb as a story · 282 points
HN discussionDifferent word order (especially, verb-noun order [1]), different syntax for affixes and adpositions, difficulty in segmentation and even the non-existence of English-like "words", ... You can't "localize" programming languages in that way. A new programming language, probably similar in semantics but with a completely rethought syntax, is needed for the true localization. [1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2019/10/ve…
Comment linking /2019/10/verb-noun-vs-noun-verb.html
on “قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic”Submitted Five Year Mission as a story · 103 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 /search/label/noise
on “Microsoft open sources parts of Minecraft: Java Edition”Submitted Optimizing A* for grid maps as a story · 60 points
HN discussionThanks! Lots of changes since the last time it showed up (2017 I think): faster page load, less JS, better diagrams, more diagrams, better colors, axes legend, more polish, more interactive parts. I wrote about these http://simblob.blogspot.com/2018/04/april-updates-hex-grid-g... and http://simblob.blogspot.com/2018/04/april-updates-iteration....
Comment linking /2018/04/april-updates-iteration.html
on “Hexagonal Grids (2013)”Submitted Procedural Tree Generator as a story · 48 points
HN discussionA surprise to see my page on HN! For those of you curious about the tech: Diagrams are in SVG. Canvas would be faster but SVG is easier for me to work with, especially for attaching mouse events to each hexagon. It also automatically scales to high dpi displays. With SVG and HTML accessed the same way, I can use the same code for updating text/samples as I do for updating diagrams. This includes interpolating values…
Comment linking /2018/12/printing-my-pages.html
on “Hexagonal Grids (2013)”Submitted Map homunculus (2014) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionFor you and those that played any of the 4-7 for comparison, how was the change in map scale compared to pace of wilderness? I was reading this https://simblob.blogspot.com/2014/05/map-homunculus.html?m=1 and it shows dev reasoning for the changes, but I'm curious how gamers actually took it. Was it better before or after?
Comment linking /2014/05/map-homunculus.html?m=1
on “Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step”Submitted Hex Diagram Labels as a story · 29 points
HN discussion(author here) I wrote most of these notes in 1997 while working on a game. Little did I realize that it'd be one of my most popular web pages. The diagrams are colorful but I don't like them ( http://simblob.blogspot.com/2013/12/diagrams-on-my-pathfindi... ) so I'm now making new interactive diagrams, starting with breadth first search ( http://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/tower-defense/ ). While writing that pa…
Comment linking /2013/12/diagrams-on-my-pathfinding-pages.html
on “Introduction to A*”Submitted Connected Components as a story · 8 points
HN discussionVue is pretty good at generating SVG (I use Vue+SVG on https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ ) but there's a trick for making it work with Canvas too. https://simblob.blogspot.com/2018/03/using-vue-with-canvas.h... — it will make the canvas drawing function depend on the right data in Vue, so that if any of that data changes, it re-draws the canvas automatically.
Comment linking /2018/03/using-vue-with-canvas.html
on “Building a Hexagonal Grid in CSS”Submitted What I Did in 2023 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHere's a few more, from my Feedly: Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/ Fabien Sanglard - https://fabiensanglard.net/ Rachel - http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ Bruce Eckel - https://bruceeckel.substack.com/ (old blog @ https://www.bruceeckel.com/ ) Blobs in Games - https://simblob.blogspot.com/ Astrid dot tech - https://astrid.tech/ Brendan Gregg - https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/ Stargirl Flowers - https://blog.thea.codes/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024?”Submitted Hexagon Conversions as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThanks! Yes, I've been making interactive diagrams for a long time. I wrote about my motivation in 2007 [1]. In the early 2000s it was Java applets, and then I switched to Flash applets, and then HTML5 in 2011. That was also around the time I ran out of disk space on my stanford site (they give me 100MB) so I bought a domain name, redblobgames.com. That was also around the time there was enough cross-browser support…
Comment linking /2007/07/interactive-illustrations.html
on “Flow Field Pathfinding”Submitted Blobs in Games: What I did in 2020 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAuthor here. A surprise seeing this on HN! The context: I'm writing my own blog software for various reasons [1], including my desire to post less to social media. As much as possible I'm trying to reuse the build system for the rest of the site, including the template. I have worked on and off on this for the past two months and I expect to keep adding features for another month or two. I'm currently adding categor…
Comment linking /
on “Flow Field Pathfinding”Submitted Updating my Introduction to A* as a story · 4 points
HN discussion(BTW, Norman's server seems to be suffering under the load; https://web.archive.org/web/20210223015500/https://www.cs.tu... has your (Way)Back if you're suffering problems in accessing it.) I've been interested in literate programming for a long time; for my self-bootstrapping PEG parser https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md I wrote my own noweb-like system called HandAxeWeb in Lua (5.x) https:/…
Comment linking /2007/07/interactive-illustrations.html
on “Noweb – A Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming”Submitted Ten Years of Red Blob Games as a story · 3 points
HN discussionLink doesn't work for me, but I found the article on the site: http://simblob.blogspot.com/2017/09/mapgen2-html5.html
Comment linking /2017/09/mapgen2-html5.html
on “Polygonal Map Generation, HTML5 Version”Submitted Graph search diagrams and reusable code as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThanks! The short answer is: no. The longer answer is: I'm not actually sure how to solve this problem. The second site, simblob.blogspot.com, is an actual blog. It's time ordered. It has posts. But the main site, redblobgames.com, is structured as a "living document" site, not as a blog. Things are not posted in order. I could try an automated feed that looks for any changes on pages. But I make small changes all t…
Comment linking /2022/11/introduction-to-hexagons-part-2.html
on “Red Blob Games: Interactive visual explanations of math and algorithms”Submitted Spaceship game editor (Thruster design and Linear algebra) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis year I've mostly been updating existing pages in small ways (examples: [1] [2]). This week I've been fixing broken links, which isn't a good HN submission. I think the best candidate is https://www.redblobgames.com/making-of/draggable/ . It's from earlier this year and hasn't been posted to HN yet (I think). [1] https://simblob.blogspot.com/2023/04/explaining-hexagon-layo... [2] https://simblob.blogspot.com/202…
Comment linking /2023/04/improving-mapgen4s-boundaries-part-2.html
on “Red Blob Games: Interactive visual explanations of math and algorithms”Submitted Jobs table implementation for r/roguelikedev project as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
