Games by Mason Hey, I’m Mason! 👋 I’m an independent game developer, and a board member on the Zig Software Foundation. [Newsletter](https://gamesbymason.com/newsletter/) | [Blog](https://gamesbymason.com/blog/)

Updated all my game dev libraries today:

codeberg.org/Games-by-Mas...

Zig 0.16.0 released!

ziglang.org/download/0.1...

A screenshot of the PIGCON website. Two featured guests shown on the site include Mike Bennett & Mike Lorenzo working on a Mystery Project and Olivia Haines with her game Surf Club.

You can now preview tickets for the Portland Indie Game Convention & sign up for a notification to pick yours up when they go live this Thursday, April 16th at 9am PT!
Take a look at
ti.to/pigsquad/pig...
Here we go! 🤩

Some halloween decorations

As some of you know, I left my job a week ago to become a full time game developer. I did stand ups from the room where I stored all my halloween blow molds so they all knew how much I liked Halloween. Today, I got this unexpected present in the mail. Thank you very much, old work!

Incredible ❤️

Tickets are up for the next Software You Can Love conference in Vancouver!
mattnite.net/blog/sycl-20...

🧮 How To Write Fast Game Engine Math How I write fast game engine math.

🧮 How To Write Fast Game Engine Math

#gamedev gamesbymason.com/blog/2026/ma...

The PIGCON: Portland Indie Game Convention logo, depicting a large Cubepig over a city with a bridge. Text also reads "May 30th - 31st, 2026 Norse Hall, Portland, OR"

ANNOUNCING:
PIGCON, the Portland Indie Game Convention
A weekend for indie devs of all kinds to learn, share, and connect
May 30-31 at Norse Hall, Portland, OR
pigcon.pigsquad.com
See you this spring 😉🌟

We'll be at GDC! (Some of us, and probably some of you?)

Come hang out, say hi, and chat about roguelikes & procedural generation.
# In Yerba Buena Gardens (North corner).
> At 12:30 PM, Thursday, March 12.
% With coffee, various hot teas, bagels & spreads.

Have we reached a game singularity?

If somebody born today wants to play 3D shooters, they have enough great, AAA or award winning shooters to play for decades. Like Zelda? We have years and years of that.

With so much to choose from, new games have diminishing returns. Unique still matters.

On The Value of Fresh Eyes Evaluating works-in-progress, featuring dozens of pages on Poly Fighter

jmargaris.substack.com/p/on-the-val...

🔗 Neat Shader Tricks, The Future of Graphics APIs, and Other Links

It’s been a while since I did a links round up–here’s the cool stuff I read/watched over the past few months!

#gamedev #indiedev

gamesbymason.com/devlog/2026/...

👀 It's Not About the API - Fast, Flexible, and Simple Rendering in Vulkan What if Vulkan isn't as complex as you thought? This talk walks you through a fast, flexible, and simple appraoch to writing efficient graphics engines in Vulkan.

Many programmers consider Vulkan to be overly complex–maybe not even worth engaging with as an #indiedev. It’s easy to see why people feel this way.

If this is how you Vulkan, or modern graphics APIs in general, the goal of this talk is to change your mind.

gamesbymason.com/blog/2026/vu...

"I Fixed Windows Native Development"

Cool script for installing the VS SDK/toolchain without going through Microsoft's installers.

marler8997.github.io/blog/fixed-w...

🪟 Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable When you think Microsoft you probably don't think sense of humor. And yet, I'm convinced that Microsoft is going to do a very specific *very* funny thing within our lifetimes.

🪟 Prediction: Microsoft Is Going To Do The Funniest Thing Imaginable

gamesbymason.com/blog/2026/mi...

🔉 Statically Linking PipeWire I created a statically linked build of PipeWire for Tuple by reimplementing dlopen.

🔉 Statically Linking PipeWire

I recently helped @tuple.app solve an interesting problem. On #Linux, Static binaries are easier to ship, but PipeWire expects dynamic linking.

To solve this, I've open sourced a static build of PipeWire. Read more below.

gamesbymason.com/blog/2025/st...

that feeling when you’re about to have a text renderer, but not yet

mitchellh.com/writing/ghos...

All hyperlinks & additional commentary can be found here:

gamesbymason.com/devlog/2025/...

And lastly, the miscellaneous/creative writing section. My favorite post here is "Last-Lamb".

Cool tech links from this month include Johnny Marler's hot swappable Unity plugin loader, improvements to how git handles large files, and more.

I like reading about game design, but it’s hard to find good stuff. Tech and business writing is easier to find. If you have a game design blog ping me!

Here's what I enjoyed this month.

Steam has also been doing some good stuff. You can now embed videos in your long description, and they announce that they're gonna start shipping gaming ready PCs running Linux in 2026.

Zig turned 10 this August (🎂!), and in October Synadia and TigerBeetle made a $512,000 pledge to the Zig Software Foundation.

This issue contains updates on Zig, as well as links to blog posts and talks about Zig from around the web.

🔗 Prototype Progress, Monthly Links, & Zig Turns 10

I've been busy wrapping up the prototype of my next game, but I set aside some time for my link roundup.

This thread is a summary + screenshots, scroll down for hyperlinks--not my preference, social media sites don't want you to leave. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You’re welcome, I’m glad you found it helpful! Good luck on your Zig gamedev journey, it’s exciting to see more people doing games in Zig :)

🖼️ Stop Shipping PNGs In Your Games Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs? The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.

🖼️ Stop Shipping PNGs In Your Games

Are you shipping textures to players as PNGs?

The goal of this post is to convince you that this is suboptimal, and walk you through a better approach.

gamesbymason.com/blog/2025/st...

#gamedev #indiedev

Do I know anyone who’s an expert on HDR that would be down to answer a few questions over DM?

"Renting is for Suckers"

andrewkelley.me/post/renting...

Maybe it’s a way to increase the challenge, like juggling blindfolded