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Comment by dcuthbertson | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how it compares with Handmade Hero https://handmadehero.org/

I've really enjoyed watching the handmade hero videos - but it's not for everyone. Since you see every keystroke, and as the engine progresses every refactoring, you really need to enjoy the "craft of coding". You're not getting a tutorial!

handmade hero is like learning the process of cooking (what ingredients are good for what sort of flavour etc), vs a tutorial, which is simply a list of steps which you follow, and will get some decent result.

By learning from a tutorial over time, you'll attain some level of mastery (i mean, after seeing how every recipe tells you similar things, you have to learn it). But i think learning from a master like an apprentice is the much easier, and sure fire way to attain mastery.

Well, just watch the sheer amount of videos of handmadehero and I don't think he's finished. I'd consider the book if I were you. It's ridiculous https://www.youtube.com/user/handmadeheroarchive/videos

Certainly following all those videos is an inefficient way to learn. As smoyer said, it's more about the craft of coding, so maybe I made an apples/oranges comparison.

Does anyone know about the depth and structure of the code in "How to Make an RPG"? From the post, it looks like it is focusing specifically on gameplay issues. Handmade Hero is covering quite a range of topics from basic gamepad input and audio output (done early in the series) on up. It is structured so that it's relatively easy to port to non-Windows OS's, and I like the live-coding feature which really shortens the code-compile-test cycle.

I guess it would be nice to see the table of contents and maybe a sample chapter or excerpts.

There is a table of contents at the bottom of this page: https://howtomakeanrpg.com/

I bought the book. Haven't read it yet but the PDF is 978 pages and the downloads of source/assets was approx. 2GB.

Roughly glancing through the book, there seems to be code examples on most pages. Looks like he's using LUA.

Yea... Handmade Hero is a very awesome idea, but I can't imagine the amount of dedication it would take for someone to sit down one day and decide to watch all 300+ videos. It's like an order of magnitude more content than a college course already and it's clearly far from finished.

>I don't think he's finished.

Not even close. I think he spent the last three or four episodes working out how to efficiently sort sprites or something.

I enjoyed watching a few of his videos but because they are all live streams they are obviously not edited so sometimes there are mistakes or sections where not much happens.

My biggest complaint is that he spends a lot of time setting up his dev environment that I found to be super confusing for a newcomer. I am an experienced dev and couldn't understand why he spent so much time mucking around with writing batch files and setting up emacs instead of just encouraging new users to just use Visual Studio where you can click compile and run and the setup takes 5 minutes instead of 2 screencasts.

Because he is doing it like an experienced dev who prefers to use the right tools for the job, not a quick "click to compile" IDE.

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