Resources

On my game development journey I've found some excellent resources around the internet. Here's a collection of my favourites!

Textures/Images/Material Creation

• Materialize - A free, open source, image to material creator used by the Uncharted Team! With this I literally went outside, took a photo of tree bark and had a seamless bark texture in about 20 minutes. Insane.
• Icons - All the icons used in Android in a vector format. They're free to use for everyone. I use this site all the time for app development/design as well as stealing icons for games.
• CG Bookcase - A collection of excellent free materials and textures with a CC0 license.
• Quixel Megascans - Completely free if you are using them with Unreal Engine projects. There is a great plug-in for it and all you have to do is click on the texture you like and import it directly to UE4. You just need to sign in with your Epic account.
• Quixel Mixer - Another free material creator. Similar to Materialize, you can easily layer textures and materials from the Quixel Megascans library to create custom materials. Then you can import them straight into Unreal Engine. Again, completely free with no licenses needed for UE4 projects.

Books

• Packt Publishing Free Learning - Get a new free book every day! They also have a number of books that are free forever. I started reading "Extreme C".
• Ray Tracing in One Weekend - No seriously. I can't believe this is free and it comes endorsed from one of the rendering engineers I work with. There are also two other free books to help you with ray tracing. (I have a full review here).

Interesting Blogs

• Coding Horror - Written and created by Jeff Atwood; the founder of stackoverflow. It's not updated often but has some interesting stories and I referenced it a few times in assignments throughout my degree.
• All Things Andy Gavin - One of the co-founders of Naughty Dog. I've linked to a great post about the creation of Crash Bandicoot.
• Paul Graham - Has an impressive resume and some great articles. I've linked to one that I've read a few times and referenced in various uni assignments.
• Bjarne Stroustrup - The man, the myth, the legend. He doesn't exactly blog but his site is filled to the brim with interesting quotes, papers and humorous quips.
• Scott Meyers - One of the C++ greats with a very distinct haircut. 
• Cell Performance - Don't be put off by the title, this blog is by the master of Data Oriented programming; Mike Acton. At work we refer to him as "Saint Acton".
• James' Opinions on Engineering Intern Applications - This twitter thread was written by one of our Lead Gameplay Engineers and has a bunch of great tips on how to apply for an intern/graduate role within the games industry.

3D Modelling

• The Blender Doughnut - The infamous blender doughnut tutorial by everyone's favourite Australian blender artist. I love it so much I've done it twice now. If you want to learn how to use Blender; this is the tutorial to get you started. (You can see my attempts here).
• MTree - A free modular tree add on for Blender 2.8. Don't want to spend time modelling a tree? Well there's a modifier for that! Create random trees with ease.

DirectX

• RasterTek - This was the site where I first learnt how to program with DirectX11. Outdated but I found it easy enough to follow in my early days so it gets a shout here.

Programming

• Learncpp - When I first started learning C++ I would go between this site and Bjarne Stroustrup's Practice & Principles as I found that Alex sometimes explained things in a way easier to understand for complete beginners. I still check this site every now and then when I can't be bothered to go hunting through Bjarne's book.
• Code Smell - A great article on how smelly bad code is. There is a plethora of good articles on this site about generic programming principles.
• CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data Oriented Design and C++" - This video blew my mind. In engine, this is the type of programming we follow religiously. 
• Code::Dive 2014 Scott Meyers: CPU Caches and Why You Care - This video is recommended by everyone in engine and is a must watch. It's practically part of our training. 
• Typical C++ Bullshit - A humorous post-it note slide show from Mike Acton highlighting some of the bad things we game developers do with code.
• cppreference - I have this permanently opened in another tab now when writing code. The amount of times this has saved me is ridiculous. Basically it's documentation for C++.
• My Hardest Bug Ever - Another Crash Bandicoot anecdote (but the team seriously pushed the boat out on that game). An amazing tale of how a simple button press when you're not expecting it can ruin everything.

Game Development

• PIX for Windows - Nowhere near as good as PIX for xbox (I love instruction traces) but still one of the best tools to help you see what your CPU and GPU is doing in your application. Useful for identifying repetitive calls that you can cut out or zoom in on areas that are taking up the most of your precious frame time.
• OpenStreetMap - Free to use under an open license. I used this in Uni to download a rough 3D model of my local town. It had some height map data and most of the roads were correct.
• DaFont - The font site I've been using since around 2006. Just the best way to find the perfect font. Make sure you check the license on them though before using them in projects released for the public.
• Unreal Engine Marketplace - The marketplace has an amazing selection of permanently free assets as well as ones that are made free for a month. I've been gathering "free for the month" assets since 2017 and have amassed quite a collection of sounds, environments, 3d models, materials and plugins.
• Unreal Engine Learning - Epic have finally got their act together and have a great learning portal now to get you started with the engine. You can earn achievements now with every course you complete which is great for those who just have to get every achievement (like me). I've completed 14 courses as of writing this with my favourite 3 being Materials Master Learning, Your First Hour With Unreal and Ambient and Procedural Sound Design.

Music (it's hard to find truly free music, always check the license)

• Fesliyan Studios - Royalty free background music for projects as long as you're not charging or making money from it. If you want to charge for your product, a donation is required.
• Bensound - You've probably heard tracks from this site a lot in YouTube videos. Has a good few that are completely free to use in videos and games without a license; only credit is required. However, a pro license is required if you want to sell your game (monetizing videos only require credit).
• YouTube Audio Library - Do you love Kevin MacLeod? Of course you do. Here is a selection of copyright and royalty free tracks from YouTube itself.
• Incompetech - Speaking of Kevin, you can get all his music here. Only credit is needed for most things. He also takes commissions for free.
• Free Sound Effects - Exactly that. Can be used in commercial products but check the license.

Random

• The lost art of Final Fantasy IX - FF9 is my favourite game in the world and this old forum thread is still one of my favourite finds on the internet.
• Scott Cawthon watching his game go viral - This thread should be immortilised somewhere. Scott, the creator of Five Nights at Freddy's, used ClickTeam Fusion to create the original game. Here he created a forum thread asking for feedback on the first FNAF. Read here as he watches the game grow.
• Describe what developing for each console you've developed for is like - An interesting reddit post. This was actually picked up by a few programming news sites. I remember reading this in my second year of uni and wondering why PIX was "hand delivered by angels". I didn't know what PIX was. Now I use pix everyday and can confirm it's heavenly.
• Atom Smasher - Ever wanted to make your own Windows XP error messages? Well now you can! Atom Smasher also has several other hilarious generators.
• Corporate Gibberish Generator - I've used this a few times to create absoloute nonsense corporate gibberish. The scary part is that it actually sounds legit. Andrew Davidson also has a few other fun web projects linked on his site.
• Aaron's Shitty Windbg cheatsheet - exactly as it says on the tin. If you want a cheat sheet for Windbg; this is the one for you.
• Seventh Sanctum - An amazing collection of random generators from names, to fantasy worlds and even short plots. I've been using this site for the best part of ten years now.
• Orteil - The home of the Cookie Clicker creator. Some great resources for you to create your own idle clicker and some cool random generators.
• Prince of Persia Apple II - A github for the original PoP game. Great for those looking for coding examples of 6502.
• IndieGameJams - A handy interactive calendar of every game jam it can find. Which one will take your fancy?
• Random.org - A fantastic site that uses atmospheric noise to generate random data sets. From lists of integers to strings; lottery numbers, dates, black and white bitmap images and more! Excellent if you need to drive true randomness in your application.

Videos

• Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way - This is a fantastic talk from GDC 2018 from Jeff Vogel; an "indie" game dev who has been in the business since 1994 making his own games. If you need inspiration or a pep talk; this is the video to watch. Also a good reminder on how shareware still works; even today. My favourite quote from the video: 'My process is, I figure out what I want to play and I make it.'
• How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original PlayStation - I recently discovered this series from the Ars Technica YouTube channel which interviews developers from the "good ol' days". It's fascinating how developers like Andy Gavin got round the hardware limitations.
• How Prince Of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations - What a great watch. How Jordan Mechner created the shadow man is just inspirational.