Ten Years of Red Blob Games

From Red Blob Games's Blog

Wow, it's been over ten years now for Red Blob Games. I had started experimenting with interactive diagrams in Java back in the early 2000s, and wrote a blog post in 2007 about why I wanted them. My early experiments weren't entirely satisfactory. Although Flash applets worked better than Java applets, they both produced the diagrams alone, not the whole page. Once HTML5 became widely available in 2011, I started learning how to make interactive diagrams with it. I concluded that HTML5 would let me create the unified experience of interactive text+diagrams that I wanted. I started Red Blob Games in late 2011 to explore this style of interactive articles, which Bret Victor called "explorable explanations".

Five years ago I wrote about the first five years of Red Blob Games. One of the big realizations is that my best pages (pathfinding, hexagons, procedural map generation) came out of topics I was using in real projects. And I had run out of topics for big tutorials.

My "greatest hits" were in the first five years. What have I been up to in the second five years?

• I shifted my focus from making a few big tutorials to making many small tutorials. I wrote a guide to grid edges because I think edges can be just as interesting as tiles. I wrote a guide to Delaunator as a visual explanation of the Delaunator library and all the cool things it can do. I wrote a tutorial on circle fills & outlines on grids.
• I improved my existing pages - hexagons, pathfinding, visibility, noise-based terrain, guide to grid parts, and many others. I'm trying to treat them as always-improving like a single-author wiki rather than set in stone like a typical blog post or article that's written, published, and never updated.
• I've been helping other people make tutorials. I've been part of the Explorable Explanations community, I mentored people working on an interactive version of the AIMA textbook, I've worked with a colleague on a tutorial, I've written an interactive tutorial to teach how to make interactive articles, I made a collection of "starter" scripts that you can copy to get started with your own interactive articles. I wrote up notes on draggable objects and design elements that I use. If you're interesting in making your interactive articles, email me!
• I've been playing more. I pursue small projects related to whatever interests me. Most of what you see in the Play section of my home page came from this period.
• I dove deep into procedural map generation, spending a year reading papers, experimenting with techniques, rewriting mapgen2, and finally creating mapgen4. It was amazing but it took a lot out of me.
• I've improved the site design and hosting, caching, printing, https, responsive design, touch events, ipv6.
• I've been spending some time learning math, geology, biology. I want to spend more time learning things for myself instead of trying to think of everything in terms of how it relates to my web site.
• I wrote a "what I did" post each year: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. I've been pretty happy with writing up an annual summary. Sometimes I feel like I didn't get a lot done but those posts remind me of all the things I did.

So what's next for me? What goals do I have for the third five years? I don't know. I usually switch gears in life every ten years, but I don't have something else in mind right now. I'm definitely slowing down on writing explanations (whether interactive or not), but I don't see myself stopping. I have lots of other projects I want to do, including ideas for more tutorials, and I want to find a better balance between doing things for me and writing pages to share with others.