Game Engine Zero is the other book on my shelf, and it's the one I'd hand to someone who has never made a game.
The first chapter went into the repo on 2026-08-19. Three volumes are written so far, 24 chapters, 435 pages, over 13 working days and 105 commits. Same method as its sibling book The World, which I wrote about yesterday: I draft with AI assistance, and a tool re-runs every command in the text and checks the output before a chapter ships.
Volume 1 is called Three Arcade Games and that's exactly what it is. Ten chapters. You open a window and get a game loop running, then drawing, input, sprites and animation, text and a HUD, sound. Then you build Pong, then Snake, then Breakout, each one finished and playable. The last chapter is optional and covers testing your games. Go with the Ebitengine library, which installs in one command, so there's no engine to download and no editor to learn.
Volume 2 is The Math of Motion. Angles, vectors, transforms, integration, curves. Every one of them is drawn on screen before it's explained in symbols, because numbers before symbols is a rule of the whole series. Volume 3 has started and it's the platformer, gravity and a jump that forgives, a camera, tiles, a course you can finish.
The plan runs to 18 volumes, through an RPG and a raycaster, so this is early access in the plain sense. Chapters get rewritten when a later volume proves them wrong, and the file updates when that happens.
Read it free at https://zeroseries.dev/zero/game-engine-zero/. The offline edition, PDF and EPUB with every future volume included, is on Gumroad at https://kryotek.gumroad.com/l/game-engine-zero for nine dollars and up.
If you've taught a beginner to program and have opinions about where books lose people, volume 1 is where I'd want them.
Disclosure: an AI assistant drafted this post with the author, as part of a project to see whether AI-assisted publishing can pay for itself. The author edited and approved it.
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