Take just rendering (my area of expertise): There's game programming in general, OOP and ECS, input and update loops, setting up a window, common patterns, etc, necessary prerequisite stuff.
Then there's rendering APIs and the GPU, e.g. learning about vertex/fragment shader concepts and syntax, buffers and uploading data, binding resources, making pipelines and such, etc. Then there's how to make an actual rendering _engine_, e.g. abstractions for batching entities, generating draw lists, command buffer recording for various passes, etc. Then there's lighting - analytic direct lights, many many forms of baked or realtime indirect lighting, BRDFs and PBR shaders, the pain that is shadow mapping, etc. Then on top of all that there's actually optimizing everything both from a CPU and GPU (shader) perspective.
And that's _just_ rendering. Game engines are usually way more. Asset management, physics, UI, possibly scripting, possibly networking, animations, usually some sort of scene editor, etc. All of those with many many subfields and complexities.
The content on the site seems to also follow, even quickly browsing from the materials there and despite using Vulkan (which is much more verbose than necessary), it still only mentions basic things like rendering sprites, meshes, some scene representation and leaves lighting and shadows (which only get a couple of paragraphs to describe the ideas behind shadow mapping) at the very end (up to that point everything is unlit/fullbright). Even lighting is only described at its basics and the page mentions some external resources to learn more if anyone wants to.
The notes included on the site are quite complete. They make it clear that the GPU day’s project consists of modifying an existing WebGPU program. Other days like the text adventure have “higher” expectations (because the barrier to entry is lower).
Overall, it’s not what a professional might envisage, but it would definitely provide a top to bottom orientation on the workings of a game engine.
heh, every book should end with just such a chapter
It's quite pricey for a "casual" purchase but I found that my public library offers the ebook for checkout, so one may wish to check their local library to see if it's similarly available
Also they weren't written by college professors but by demoscene teenagers :-P.
Fashion trends tend to change over the years :-)
Our end result was cool though, we got a Guitar hero guitar working on it and remade clone hero. Fun times.
Sarcasm aside, there's still lots to learn from the series although it does look like Casey's promise of "writing a complete game [...]" might not actually become a reality in the foreseeable future.
