Stuff We Like.

Roots

Where we come from — text adventures, MUDs, the BBS era, and the people keeping that history alive.

• Colossal Cave Adventure — Play the 1976 original in your browser. The cave this studio is named after.
• The Digital Antiquarian — Jimmy Maher’s patient, definitive history of interactive entertainment. Start anywhere.
• The Interactive Fiction Archive — The community’s library of interactive fiction, kept safe since 1992.
• textfiles.com — The BBS era, preserved file by file. We remember some of these boards.
• BBS: The Documentary — Jason Scott’s eight-episode documentary about the bulletin-board years.
• Richard Bartle — Richard Bartle co-wrote the first MUD in 1978; his site keeps the papers, the history, and the player-type theory.
• The MUD Connector — The classic MUD directory — hundreds still running. We held the keys to one, once.
• tbaMUD — The living descendant of the DikuMUD–CircleMUD line that admins of our era ran.
• Mudlet — A modern, open-source MUD client. The genre never died; it just got quieter.
• Wizardry — Sir-Tech’s 1981 dungeon crawl — party of six, permadeath, graph paper mandatory. The blueprint for every party RPG since.
• Lord British — Richard Garriott — Akalabeth, Ultima, and the Avatar’s whole moral universe. Has been to orbit and the ocean floor; still Lord British.
• The Bard’s Tale — Skara Brae, 1985 — the dungeon crawl learns to sing. Brian Fargo’s inXile keeps the songbook today.
• Looking Glass Studios — Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief — the immersive sim was born at Looking Glass. TTLG’s community has kept the flame since the nineties.
• OtherSide Entertainment — Founded by Looking Glass’s own Paul Neurath — the bloodline, continued.
• Arkane Studios — Dishonored and Prey — the immersive-sim torch, carried furthest.
• Ghost Story Games — Ken Levine’s Irrational, continued — the System Shock 2 to BioShock line.
• Nightdive Studios — Preservation as a studio — System Shock and the classics, restored and re-shipped.

The craft

Building games, and building them well.

• Game Programming Patterns — Robert Nystrom’s free book on the patterns under every game you’ve played.
• Unreal Engine Documentation — The official Unreal Engine documentation — our daily terrain.
• GAS Documentation — The community bible for the Gameplay Ability System — the architecture under all our combat.
• ben ui — UPROPERTY and UFUNCTION specifier references, searchable — the lookup we reach for weekly.
• Tom Looman — Tom Looman’s Unreal C++ articles and course notes — professional-grade, current.
• UE5 Style Guide — The de-facto community standard for Unreal naming and project structure.

Channels

The YouTube channels we’ve learned from the most — measured by what we actually watch, not by what sounds impressive.

• Blender — 3D fundamentals straight from the source.
• The Cherno — C++ and game-engine development, taught from the trenches.
• Adobe Substance 3D — Material authoring from the people who make the tools.
• Travis Vroman — Building a Vulkan game engine from scratch, live and unabridged.
• PolyBoost — UE5 PCG and Niagara workflows — the channel behind our procedural-content playbook.
• Anthropic — The lab behind Claude — our operators’ homeroom.
• Ali Elzoheiry — UE5 systems design in Blueprint — clear, architectural, reusable.

The machine room

The protocols and instruments of AI-directed work.

• Model Context Protocol — The open standard our entire toolchain speaks.
• Claude — The operator on the other side of our tools.

Curiosities

Everything else that earned a place on the shelf.

• xkcd — Required reading since 2005.

A shelf this young is mostly empty space. It fills as we wander.