Mason Remaley
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masonremaley.bsky.social
Mason Remaley
@masonremaley.bsky.social
130 followers 170 following 97 posts
Independent game developer, board member on the Zig Software Foundation. Shipped Way of Rhea, working on something new. 🏳️‍🌈

The good stuff goes to my mailing list, follow me there instead:

gamesbymason.com/newsletter/
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masonremaley.bsky.social
🔗 June Links - Wolfire vs Steam, Indie vs AAA, What Does ‘Content Creator’ mean anyway?

#gamedev #indiedev

gamesbymason.com/devlog/2025/...
Screenshot of part of the post
July 10, 2025 at 5:23 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
#gamedev #indiedev #shaders
Simulated splatter paint
June 11, 2025 at 6:05 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
#gamedev #indiedev #shaders
June 11, 2025 at 6:05 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
While I have you, here are some more cool Voronoi patterns:

#gamedev #indiedev #shaders
June 11, 2025 at 6:05 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
There’s a problem if you want to use this to draw colored cells though. There’s no antialiasing!

#gamedev #indiedev #shaders
June 11, 2025 at 6:05 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
Voronoi noise is really fun, and surprisingly versatile.

#gamedev #indiedev #shaders
Various voronoi noise patterns
June 11, 2025 at 6:05 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
As part of my shader library, I've been playing with Voronoi Noise and Voronoi Diagrams.

#gamedev #indiedev #shaders
June 11, 2025 at 6:05 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
Perlin noise + fractal brownian motion for the fire, plain perlin noise for the wind #gamedev #indiedev
June 9, 2025 at 10:07 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
SDFs + Noise #gamedev #indiedev
June 7, 2025 at 10:56 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
SDFs are also fun #gamedev #indiedev
June 7, 2025 at 10:41 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
Playing with noise #gamedev #indiedev
June 5, 2025 at 3:50 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
🎂 Also, this May marks Way of Rhea's 1 year birthday!

To celebrate, I released the original sound track, added an infinite mode patch, and put the game on sale for 50% off in the @puzzleshowcase.bsky.social :)

store.steampowered.com/app/1110620/...

#gamedev #indiedev
May 29, 2025 at 7:49 PM
masonremaley.bsky.social
📅 May Links

I'm doing a new thing where I share my favorite links at the end of each month on my site, you can read May's links here.

#gamedev #indiedev

gamesbymason.com/devlog/2025/...
A screenshot of the links in the linked blog post
May 29, 2025 at 7:49 PM
masonremaley.bsky.social
In the past, it was common for developers to self fund the development of a vertical slice, and then send it to publishers in the hopes of securing funding to develop the full game.

#gamedev #indiedev
Nathan Fielder holding a very thin slice of watermelon
May 10, 2025 at 2:40 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
🌴 What I Learned from Staying Inside

Chris Zukowski holds an online conference "Staying Inside" on game marketing every year. I wrote up some notes.

Multiple speakers touched on a shift happening in game funding that may be of interest even if you aren’t looking for funding...

#gamedev #indiedev
Promo art for the Staying Inside 2025 conference, features a bridge (presumably in San Francisco.)
May 10, 2025 at 2:40 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
For hot paths you could could manually check the generated code, but if you’re trying to analyze your entire program you’re going to want a profiler.
A screenshot of the Tracy profiler
April 23, 2025 at 2:29 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
If you sign up for my newsletter, I’ll send you regular writing covering:
* Game design
* Game marketing on Steam
* Updates on my open source game engine in Zig
* Links to worthwhile articles on game dev from around the internet
past blog posts: Fullscreen Exclusive Is A Lie (...sort of), Notes from the Q&A Sessions with Steam, Highlights from 'I spent 6 years developing a game in Rust and it just shipped, AMA', Making Your Game Go Fast By Asking Windows Nicely, It's Not Survivorship Bias (Talk), It's Not About The Technology - Game Engines are Art Tools
April 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
If you try to extend this to my empirically tested range, it 'mostly' works but there are some divergent points represented by the dashed black lines here:
March 3, 2025 at 4:45 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
You can then overlay |y - 1| < |x - 1| to find the areas where the approximation brings you closer to 1 rather than further:
|y - 1| < |x - 1| |y - 1| < |x - 1|
March 3, 2025 at 4:45 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
If you define f(x) to be the approximate normalization and graph it, you get this:

#gamedev #math
y = |x * (-0.5x^2 + 1.5)|
March 3, 2025 at 4:45 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
It turns out most CPUs have a hardware instruction for approximate inverse square root now (e.g. on x86 it’s rsqrtss.) I’m not aware of any languages with platform independent intrinsics for this operation, but here’s a quick Zig snippet that will generate the instruction if your target supports it:
/// Fast approximate inverse square root using a dedicated hardware /// instruction when available. pub fn invSqrt(f: anytype) @TypeOf(f) { // If we're positive infinity, just return infinity if (std.math.isPositiveInf(f)) return f; // If we're NaN or negative infinity, return NaN if (std.math.isNan(f) or std.math.isNegativeInf(f) or f == 0.0) { return std.math.nan(f32); } // Now that we've ruled out values that would cause issues in // optimized float mode, enable it and calculate the inverse square // root. This generates a hardware instruction approximating the // inverse square root on platforms that have one, and is therefore // significantly faster. { @setFloatMode(.optimized); return 1.0 / @sqrt(f); } }
February 28, 2025 at 3:31 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
This function isn’t magic–it’s just the tangent line of y = 1/sqrt(x) at x = 1. You can evaluate it in one instruction if your target supports fused multiply add:
/// Very fast approximate inverse square root that only produces usable /// results when `f` is near 1. pub fn invSqrtNearOne(f: anytype) @TypeOf(f) { return @mulAdd(@TypeOf(f), f, -0.5, 1.5); }
February 28, 2025 at 3:31 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
Looks pretty bad right? Try zooming in.
The same graph, but zoomed in near (1, 1) where the linear approximation works well
February 28, 2025 at 3:31 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
Floating point division is slow, and square root is slower. What if I told you that you could approximate 1/sqrt(x) as y = -0.5x + 1.5? #gamedev #indiedev #math
A 1/sqrt(x) curve with a linear approximation that at first glance doesn't appear to fit it well
February 28, 2025 at 3:31 AM
masonremaley.bsky.social
It turns out, this was originally an optimization for the ActionScript stack machine–I guess everyone else has just been uncritically copy pasting these functions into other languages for the last 23 years. :)
NOTE : The t/=d bit in the preceding code is an optimization technique. This compound operator lets you divide and reassign t, and use its value in further operations, all in one step. The Flash Player uses a stack-based virtual machine that has four “registers” or memory locations reserved for holding data temporarily. Information can be stored and retrieved much faster from a register than from a variable, but registers are rarely used in Flash-generated bytecode. However, in-line syntax like p = (t/=d) * t is compiled to bytecodes that use one of the registers to temporarily store a value during the calculation, speeding up the process. (A special thanks goes to Tatsuo Kato for first applying this technique to my code.)
February 26, 2025 at 11:10 PM