Red Blob Games Amit Patel

I've been helping people make games since 1990. My current passion is using interactivity on the web for learning. With modern web browsers, there's no need for explanations to follow the formats used in magazines, technical papers, and books. We can combine learning by reading, learning by watching, and learning by doing.

1. I write articles and tutorials on my site, Amit's Game Programming. I tend to focus on movement and arrangement of objects in a game space: grids, paths, and maps. My newer articles are interactive (example); my older ones are not.
2. I help companies working on games or game-related projects, as an advisor. I'm currently helping Wild Shadow Studios and Root-1.
3. I release open source libraries that can be used for game development.

I'm happy to answer random questions — email me at redblobgames@gmail.com — or follow me on Twitter @redblobgames.

Advising

I'm an advisor to these companies:

• Wild Shadow Studios is a 2-man indie game company building innovative multiplayer games. Their current project, Realm of the Mad God, is a cooperative massively multiplayer action / role-playing game, with thousands of concurrent players, and group battles with up to 85 players. Visit the web site and start playing in the browser, with no signup, no account creation, no email registration, no credit card required. Realm of the Mad God has gotten positive reviews from sites such as Rock Paper Shotgun and Ars Technica, and is a finalist in the Independent Games Festival 2012. I've been working with Wild Shadow Studios since 2008.
• Root-1 is building educational games for learning language, starting with vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, using machine learning to adapt to each student's needs. They've in Fast Company's list of the world's 50 most innovative companies, and are testing their games in classrooms in several countries. Storylines, Word Joust, Word Kung Fu, and XWords are available on the web, Facebook, Chrome Web Store, and iOS. I've been working with Root-1 since 2010.

If you're developing games in the San Francisco / San Jose area and want to chat, email me at redblobgames@gmail.com. I'm especially interested in management games: transportation, city building, environment, logistics, construction, maps, warehouses, factories, business, economics, supply chains.

Articles and Tutorials

My main interest is in finding new ways of explaining things. My early experiments are: learning learning how to position car mirrors to minimize blind spots and how to design probability functions for damage rolls and attributes in role-playing games.

The intended audience is independent, student, and hobbyist game developers. Popular pages:

• Amit's Game Programming Information is a set of links I've collected and articles I've written since 1990, first on Usenet and then on the web.
• Polygon Map Generation describes how to generate game maps using Voronoi polygons. These maps are being used in Realm of the Mad God and several other projects.
• Thoughts on Pathfinding is about structuring game map data to allow calculating movement paths using A* search.
• Thoughts on Grids is about the math for square, hexagonal, and triangular grids.
• My blog has miscellaneous writings about games, game design, and game implementation.

Open Source

Current projects are on Github at github/amitp. Code is released under either the MIT License or the Apache v2 License. Both allow use in commercial projects.