Sources

38 sources from the intake. Reliability: verified = page read; summarised = abstract, snippet or unreadable PDF only (treat the digest as a lead, not a fact).

Geometry and tech

• The Transvoxel Algorithm (project page) — Eric Lengyel. verified. Transvoxel (2009) joins neighbouring marching-cubes meshes built at different resolutions without cracks.
• Voxel-Based Terrain for Real-Time Virtual Simulations (PhD dissertation, UC Davis, 2010) — Eric Lengyel. summarised. Canonical write-up of the Transvoxel method plus modified marching cubes for voxel terrain with LOD.
• Smooth Voxel Terrain (Part 2) — Mikola Lysenko (0fps). verified. Compares marching cubes, marching tetrahedra, naive surface nets, Gibson’s surface nets and dual contouring.
• Dual Contouring Tutorial — Boris the Brave. verified. Places one vertex per cell at the minimiser of a quadratic error function over edge-crossing normals (Hermite data).
• Implementing Dual Contouring — Nick Gildea. verified. Practical notes: octree with corner-sign bitmasks, crossing search by sampling edges, finite-difference normals.
• Continuous World Generation in No Man’s Sky (GDC 2017) — Innes McKendrick (Hello Games). verified. Only the session abstract was read, not the talk.
• From Screen Space to Voxel Space (Voxagon blog) — Dennis Gustafsson. verified. The post does not name Teardown and does not cover destruction.
• Teardown developer breaks down multiplayer and voxel destruction tech — 80.lv (interview with Dennis Gustafsson). verified. Objects are voxel volumes on a regular grid; the renderer ray-marches them and uses no triangles.
• Voro++: a 3D cell-based Voronoi library (overview) — Chris H. Rycroft. verified. Computes each particle’s Voronoi cell on its own, as a polyhedron, rather than one global mesh.
• Smooth minimum (smin) article — Inigo Quilez. summarised. Only search snippets and secondary pages were seen; the page itself returned 404 on fetch, so check the URL.
• Voronoi borders (distance to cell edge) — Inigo Quilez. summarised. Fetch returned 404; content is from a search snippet only.
• A Cellular Texture Basis Function (SIGGRAPH 1996) — Steven Worley. summarised. The PDF fetched but would not extract to text; content not read.
• Learning from Failure: unconventional renderers for Dreams PS4 (SIGGRAPH 2015) — Alex Evans (Media Molecule). summarised. The slide PDF exceeded the fetch size cap and was NOT read.

Base-building and sandbox design

• RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods (GDC 2017) — Tynan Sylvester. verified. Frames the game as a story generator, not a conventional game.
• Behind the design of hit sim game Oxygen Not Included — Bryant Francis (interviewing Johann Seidenz, Klei). verified. Describes the game as a sim a few steps from being work; the design task is keeping it from feeling like a chore.
• Designing an engaging and intuitive crafting system for Astroneer — Jack Yarwood. verified. No menus, recipes or tutorials: holograms show needed resources, so players learn by doing.
• Medieval Engineers dev blog: structural integrity and destruction — Marek Rosa (Keen Software House). verified. Team tried two approaches before choosing Havok Destruction plus a custom integrity algorithm.
• Q&A: Dissecting the development of Dwarf Fortress with creator Tarn Adams — John Harris (interviewing Tarn Adams). verified. Player acts as the fortress’s official will while dwarves keep autonomy; that gap yields emergent stories.
• Valheim will unleash your inner prepper from the safety of your sofa — Ewan Wilson (quoting Henrik Tornqvist, Iron Gate). verified. Building is called the most important aspect; the aim is many bases, not one.
• Software Engineering Daily: Factorio with Michal Kovarik (transcript) — Joe Nash (host) with Michal Kovarik, Wube Software. verified. Appeal is watching large production lines run; fun is favoured over strict realism.
• Towards realtime deformable worlds: why tetrahedra rule, voxels drool — Leonard Ritter (NOWHERE). verified. Voxels were tried (including dual contouring) and dropped: cubic storage, bounded grids, detail capped by resolution.
• GDC 2012: A few words with Minecraft’s Markus ‘Notch’ Persson — Game Developer staff (interviewing Markus Persson). verified. Prefers simple, fit-for-purpose behaviour over realism.
• Satisfactory developers Hannah Beuger and Rosario Baarh interview — GameWatcher staff. verified. Level design had to be reinvented for a natural, non-puzzle world.
• Breath of the Wild GDC talk coverage (multiplicative gameplay) — Jon Fingas (Engadget). summarised. Secondary report on the GDC 2017 talk, not the talk itself.
• Valheim Hearth and Home update is a builder’s dream, say the developers — Dominic Bayley (quoting Henrik Tornqvist). verified. Building called one of the most enjoyable parts of the game.

Setting, fantasy and verbs

• How Townscaper Works: A Story Four Games in the Making — Oskar Stalberg (Game Developer feature). verified. Positioned as a toy, not a game: no goals, the verbs are just add/remove block and pick colour.
• Sparking joy through tile placement in idyllic village builder Dorfromantik — Game Developer interview with Toukana Interactive (Timo Falcke). verified. The premise came out of a jam prompt, ‘Keep it Alive’: balance a civilization against the nature around it.
• Terra Nil: An Upcoming Reverse City Builder — 80.lv (Free Lives). verified. Inverts the city-builder: the goal is to restore a ruined land to an ecological paradise, not to grow a metropolis.
• Terra Nil (essay) — Adrian Hon. verified. Argues ‘reverse city builder’ is a misleading label: it plays closer to a turn-based boardgame, placing buildings in narrow highlighted spots.
• Exclusive: Tiny Glade Developers Discuss Bevy, Proceduralism, Publishers, Cozy Games — 80.lv (Pounce Light). verified. Frames the game as an open-ended toy box for making dioramas; the devs avoid manufactured events so players write their own stories.
• Live, die, repeat: How Outer Wilds piques curiosity in an ambivalent solar system — Game Developer (Mobius Digital design write-up). verified. Fantasy: relive the same 22 minutes before the sun explodes, in a universe that runs on its own schedule.
• Interview: Corralling the inherent cuteness of Cult of the Lamb — Game Developer interview with Massive Monster. verified. The cult premise supplies the verbs (sermons, rituals, sacrifice); the team checked the design against a list of what makes a cult.
• Kingdom Two Crowns and the practical intersection of pixel art and roguelike design — Game Developer (Thomas van den Berg, noio). verified. Coins are physical objects in a pouch rather than a number, which makes the economy feel tangible.
• Crafting the Creep of Creeper World — Game Wisdom (interview with Knuckle Cracker). verified. The enemy is a fluid simulation that spreads relentlessly and can only be repelled, not destroyed; the identity comes from that.
• How Media Molecule designed a fun and robust toolset for Dreams — Game Developer (Media Molecule). verified. The sculpt tool began as a jam prototype built from simple primitives; painting reuses the same primitives so the player learns one set of moves.
• GDC 2005 Report: The Future of Content (Will Wright on Spore) — Game Developer (report on Will Wright’s GDC 2005 talk). verified. More hand-made content does not raise player value proportionally, so Wright pushes procedural generation to lower the cost-to-value ratio.
• Road to the IGF: Untame’s Mushroom 11 — Game Developer (Itay Keren, Untame). verified. Keren wanted negative space as a means of control, which led to steering an organism by removing parts of it.
• MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research — Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek. summarised. Abstract page only; the PDF fetch returned unreadable binary, so the detailed definitions below come from search snippets.