Here’s a fun rabbit hole to go down if you have some free time to spend.

After a fellow named Zikubi beat the speedrun record for Super Mario Bros 3 by about 8 minutes with a time of just over three minutes, speedrun analyst Bismuth made the video above to explain how he did it…by changing the game with the gameplay itself.

The first couple minutes go exactly as you’d expect, but the speedrun takes a weird turn when, instead of using the second warp whistle to go to level 8, he uses it to go to level 7. And once in level 7, Mario races around randomly, letting opportunity slip away like a blindfolded birthday boy unwittingly steering himself away from the piñata. It’s only later, during the explanation of how he got from level 7 to the final screen so quickly, that you realize Mario’s panicky idiot behavior is actually the player actively reprogramming the game to open up a wormhole to the ending.

Written in Go. The code that implements the game logic can be found right here.

Hilary Mason is building a new way for kids and families to create stories with AI. It’s called Hidden Door, and in her first interview since founding it, Hilary reveals to Chris and Daniel what the experience will be like for kids. It’s the first Practical AI episode in which some of the questions came from Chris’s 8yo daughter Athena.

Hilary also shares her insights into various topics, like how to build data science communities during the COVID-19 Pandemic, reasons why data science goes wrong, and how to build great data-based products. Don’t miss this episode packed with hard-won wisdom!

Bevy has the following design goals:

• Capable: Offer a complete 2D and 3D feature set
• Simple: Easy for newbies to pick up, but infinitely flexible for power users
• Data Focused: Data-oriented architecture using the Entity Component System paradigm
• Modular: Use only what you need. Replace what you don’t like
• Fast: App logic should run quickly, and when possible, in parallel
• Productive: Changes should compile quickly … waiting isn’t fun

Before you get too excited, a word of warning 🚨

Bevy is still in the very early stages of development. APIs can and will change (now is the time to make suggestions!). Important features are missing. Documentation is sparse. Please don’t build any serious projects in Bevy unless you are prepared to be broken by api changes constantly.

You might be asking yourself… “is CSS a programming language now?!” Turns out it is, thanks to the Space Toggle trick (which I’m still trying to grok as I write this).

Nabeel shares some great insights about using games/simulations for learning in this post — I recommend reading it if the topic piques your interest (always be learning, amirite?).

Learning is just the act of engaging with an external thing and performing many conjecture/criticism loops, forming conclusions, and building on them to form a body of knowledge.

So it makes sense that video games would be the primary educational environment of the future: they are the best way we have of (a) creating simulations of reality (b) with fast feedback loops (c) accessible at low cost.

This is a port of robmikh’s Minesweeper using Microsoft’s Rust for Windows runtime. If you like Minesweeper, and/or Rust, and/or Windows… this repo’s for you.

Here is my python source code for training an agent to play Tetris. It could be seen as a very basic example of Reinforcement Learning’s application.

Demo on YouTube.

This is an NES emulator and a work in progress. The CPU, PPU, and APU mostly work, though there are still at least a couple bugs. I’ve mostly tested on Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. so far. There are plenty of full-featured emulators out there; this is primarily an educational project but I do want it to run well.

If you’re interested in learning about Rust and/or emulators, this is for you.

This is a simple city builder with no simulation or anything like that. Cool, nonetheless.

Imagine an infinitely generated world that you could explore endlessly, continually finding entirely new content and adventures. What if you could also choose any action you can think of instead of being limited by the imagination of the developers who created the game?

Built with OpenAI’s GPT-2 model. First of its kind. Want a primer? Check out Practical AI #32,

Jerod, Divya, & Suz get together to discuss top-level await, the JS13kGames winner, Liran Tal’s is-website-vulnerable, Vue 3’s source code, and Facebook’s take on AR/VR/XR. Plus 3 awesome pro tips you don’t want to miss!

The scope creep of cURL is also something to behold, the program can do tons of stuff! Just look at the home page! With cURL having this many features (with the general mass of them being totally unknown to me, let alone how you use them) got me thinking… What if you could do a game show style challenge for them?

I couldn’t make it past the DELETE request (stage 3) without consulting Manuel. How far can you get?

This game looks like the perfect way to get my kids coding without them knowing that I’m getting them coding. The automation is via a drag-n-drop scratch-like interface (is it Scratch?), so it should be easy for anyone to do.

Bot Land is available on all mobile platforms as well as the web. (!)

Nintendo has been slowly bringing their iconic games and characters to mobile platforms. Maybe it’s time they consider the web platform? 😉

This provides easy access to the Gamepad API, which I didn’t even know was a thing. The API is callback-style:

gameControl.on('connect', function(gamepad) {
  gamepad.on('up', moveCharacterUp);
});

Welcome to the fantastic world of nerdy regex fun! Start playing by selecting one of the puzzle challenges below. There are a wide range of difficulties from beginner to expert.

Over 52,000 nerds after my own heart have already registered to play.

Version Museum showcases the visual history of popular websites, operating systems, applications, and games that have shaped our lives.

I freakin’ love this site. They have quite a collection here, everything from Amazon.com and Google Maps to Mac OS and Super Mario Kart. Version 1.5 of Microsoft Excel was dope! (full Excel history here)

Having to open an additional app to play a game is sometimes too tiring. Therefore, I thought it’d be interesting to somehow implement Minecraft with javascript, essentially bringing the whole Minecraft game into the web. This not only takes away the tedious process of installing the game, it also brings the entire game to players within a couple clicks.

Words cannot describe how much I adore the thought that building this extremely ambitious piece of software was a better alternative to the tedious process of installing the game. 😆

This was “received from a friend of a friend”, then posted for download. That means if you download it (for learning purposes only, there are no executables here), you got it from a friend who got it from a stranger who got it from a friend of a friend (assuming we’re friends, otherwise it’s strangers all the way down).

On June 6, 2019 Tetris turned 35 years old. To celebrate, I wrote my own version and posted it in my GitHub repo. No libraries. No frameworks. Just JavaScript. Those learning JavaScript might find a few lessons here!

Jerod and Divya are joined by George Mandis to learn all about his “frivolous” JavaScript library that’s helped countless websites implement the beloved cheat code. Ten years later and still actively maintained, Konami-JS has stood the test of time and produced some epic stories along the way (you’ll love hearing how George broke Marvel.com).

Since all these projects are open source you can help them and make this world a better place. Or at least you can play something to appreciate the effort people put in them.

I love how they even highlight which games are still playable and how active their development is. A lot of love went into this very excellent resource. Game on!

With Zdog, you can design and render simple 3D models on the Web. Zdog is a pseudo-3D engine. Its geometries exist in 3D space, but are rendered as flat shapes. This makes Zdog special.

We’re talking with Victor Zhou about the explosion of the .io game genre. We talked through all the details around building and running one of these games, the details behind Victor’s super popular game called Generals — which he eventually sold, and we also covered the economics behind creating and selling one of these games.