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Re:Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch by kleiba on Saturday October 14, 2017 @07:13AM (#15471679)
I watched the first four or five weeks of episodes, but I'm still a bit puzzled by who Casey assumes to be the target audience. Granted, this is a really difficult endeavor, but I often find that he spends endless amounts of time explaining trivial things which, if you don't know them already, you'd have no chance of following along anyway. By that I mean, if you don't already know some algebra, you might "get" everything that he explains, but it's hard to imagine that you'd be able to actually internalize it to a point that you understand how it is later used in various parts of the code.

I know from my own experience, though, that it can be "fun" to explain things that you know inside out in (too much) detail because it gives you a feeling of satisfaction and appreciation of the material you're going over.

However, I can't help that for anyone to whom you have to explain high school math episode after episode, the rest of the show, i.e., actual (and sometimes rather low-level) programming would be completely over their head.

That said, I do enjoy watching the shows quite a bit and I still plan on finishing the full run. I just wish the trivial stuff wouldn't receive so much time, or that there was a good way of skipping forward without having to fear to miss something important.

One really awesome thing is that the source code is bundled up after each episode so that you can really easily get back to speed after a longer break, like in my case. What I plan to do is to find the last episode I watched, then download that episode's code, and remind myself of the current state of affairs by studying the code, rather than trying to remember the content of everything I already saw.

I think this whole series is such a cool thing to do. And you can really tell that he knows his shit.

Casey, if you hang out here on HN, two thumbs up for this awesome effort!

Re:Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch by alephr on Saturday October 14, 2017 @09:21AM (#15472044)
A community member actually annotates all the episodes with time stamped descriptions of what's going on in the videos; You can watch the episodes with them inline and clickable here: https://asafgartner.github.io/annotations_player/index.html
Re:Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch by scallywag802 on Sunday October 15, 2017 @01:24PM (#15478052)
I failed high-school math, and couldn't even spell linear algebra two years ago. I'd never done any game programming to speak of, and had never written any C code before starting Handmade Hero.

After watching through most of the series, and writing a 3d engine (HH style, no libraries), I have internalized an amazing amount; the vast majority of what Casey's gone over. I agree that often times he goes into more detail than necessary - even for me, who started knowing literally nothing about what he was talking about, but I would attribute the amount of learning I've gotten out of the series to exactly that. For someone that doesn't understand the difference between an Object Transform and a Camera Transform, the only way for them to actually learn what they are is to hammer it home again and again - through examples and practice. I think I am exactly his target audience - young programmers who want to learn how to make video games.

Just my 2c

Re:Handmade Hero – A complete game live-coded from scratch by CamperBob2 on Saturday October 14, 2017 @09:36PM (#15475385)
I think he's aiming at hardcore gamers who are interested in learning more about engine and gameplay coding.

Game development is a great way to either brush up on your linear algebra skillz or motivate you to develop them in the first place, so he can't assume that his audience is either fully up to speed or completely ignorant.