The Craft
The techniques every game shares.
Some lessons belong to a machine. Others belong to the work of making games at all: movement, timing, chance, game feel, collision, structure, and the art of finding the cheap answer a slow machine can afford. The Craft teaches those cross-machine ideas as courses, then the machine tracks turn them into real routines.
Best read after Numbers & Bits, and before or alongside your first machine track.
Where you are
03 · The Craft
Transferable technique before the machine-specific version.
Craft modules explain game-making ideas once: timing, motion, collision, chance, state, feel, and cheap tricks that survive tight hardware. Machine tracks then show the exact version that fits one CPU, screen layout, sound chip, and frame budget.
- Best after the Foundations if the programming ideas are new.
- Read beside a machine route when a game introduces a technique you want to understand more deeply.
Theory with dirty hands
Craft teaches the idea before a chip makes it weird.
Craft is allowed to be theoretical, but only where the theory earns its keep. A Craft module explains the transferable idea, the tradeoff, and the shape of the solution; the machine and language tracks show the actual version that runs on real hardware.
Spectrum Z80, C64 BASIC, NES 6502, and Amiga Blitz each turn that same idea into different code.
Where everything sits
One curriculum, different kinds of lesson.
Foundations
The ideas every programmer needs before a machine or language matters: sequence, variables, loops, numbers, bits, source, interpreters, compilers, and assemblers.
Language primers
The first real vocabulary for a chosen language or machine: how this BASIC, assembly, AMOS, Blitz, or other route says the general ideas in its own terms.
The Craft
Transferable game-making techniques: movement, timing, collision, chance, game feel, state, data, and the practical tradeoffs slow machines force into the open.
Machine tracks
The actual application: registers, ROM calls, screen memory, sound chips, frame timing, toolchains, and complete games built under one machine’s constraints.
Pattern Library
The reference shelf: short recipes and distilled patterns you can return to once the idea has been taught somewhere in the curriculum.
The machine and language-specific primers remain the first bridge into each route. As a track deepens, mid-language modules can appear where a game needs new vocabulary: not a restart, but a focused return to the language before the next real application.
Course, not reference shelf
Craft sits beside the Pattern Library.
The Pattern Library stays a dip-in reference: concrete recipes and distilled patterns you can reuse. Craft is sequenced teaching. When a concept appears in both places, the Craft module teaches it front-to-back and the pattern entry remains the quick reference.
What belongs here
Reusable techniques with proof behind them.
A topic belongs in Craft when it can be taught once, backed by runnable examples, and then applied differently on several machines. If the lesson depends on a register, chip, ROM routine, assembler, screen layout, or memory map, it belongs in a machine track or the Pattern Library instead.
- Timing & game loops
- Movement & control feel
- Collision
- State machines
- Randomness & procedural tricks
- Lookup tables
- Actors, sprites & object pools
- Animation
- Sound as feedback
- Ports & adaptation
- 01
Maths for Games
The handful of arithmetic tricks every game leans on — movement, direction, distance and chance — on machines with no fast multiply, no fractions, no square root and no sine. How to get the answer the machine hates to compute, cheaply, by trading a little exactness or memory for a lot of speed. Shown in Sinclair BASIC.
Start → - 02
Game Feel
The small rules that make a game feel fair, readable and finished: visible feedback, grace windows, ending dwells and clocked prompts. How to make the rules legible before each machine turns them into timers, branches and sprite writes.
Start →