Red Blob Games: latest blog posts

In English, there is an "indefinite" article a that can go before a word.

In 2005 Google showed off Google Maps, which lets you drag the map around instead of reloading the page like MapQuest and others used.

A few weeks ago I got distracted when I discovered — to my horror — that occasionally the font size on my site was 1.24924375rem instead of the desired 1.25rem.

Although my site isn't designed to fit into the academic world, occasionally an academic paper will cite one of my pages.

I have sample code on some of my pages.

When I started my web site, we didn't have static site generators or WordPress or GitHub Pages or much else.

(TL;DR: this is a blog post about the process of writing my guide to SDF fonts.)

When a url is posted on a forum/chat, it's often automatically made linkable.

It's time for my annual self review.

My “site” is spread across five different servers.

I had just wrapped up a project and wanted to do something small/fun before I started the next one.

I try to avoid big software rewrites.

Back in 2018 I had the idea to prerender short segments of river bends and confluences into a texture, and then use that texture to draw the rivers to the screen.

It's been a while since I've worked on mapgen4 features.

The web server I use (nginx) logs errors to a file.

Last time we implemented a search feature that found all matching documents, sorted in some arbitrary order.

I have a search box on my web site that uses Google to search my site only using the site: operator.

My hexagon guide has many conversion routines — axial to cube, cube to offset, hex to pixel, etc.

Last time I talked about de-optimizing mapgen4 so that I could more easily create experiments.

Lately I've been experimenting with map algorithms.

My guide to hexagonal grids is one of the most popular pages on my site.

I know a lot of people hated the Flash Player web plugin, but I found it to be quite useful for my experiments.

It's time for my annual self review.

When I first wrote my hexagon guide in 2013 I used d3.js, which has a nice animation system.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) I had previously posted about drawing outlines around fonts.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) In the last blog post I wrote about how I wanted to test the parameters of msdfgen, which generates multi-signed distance fields for fonts and other shapes.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) In the last few posts I have shown some of the experiments I did with font rendering.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) Over the last few posts I wrote about things I did to improve font quality, such as antialiasing and combining distance fields to merge outlines and halos.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) Learning about font rendering, I was looking at text closely last time, and I noticed another issue.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) Last time I was looking at letter spacing with my renderer to see how it compared to Google Chrome on Mac.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) My summer project is to work on labels for maps.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) In the previous post I introduced my summer project, to render labels on maps.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) My friend L recently mentioned that he hadn't seen any blog posts from me.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) I had previously blogged about text effects, and how I accidentally discovered that I could alter the personality of the font by rendering a distorted shape.

I have several pages that are unfinished because I can't find an explanation I'm happy with.

You may know me for my interactive tutorials.

On my pages I often want to be able to move an object around in a diagram using the mouse or touch.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) Earlier this year I was trying to improve font rendering in some of my C++ projects, and that led me down a rabbit hole of learning signed distance field (SDF) font rendering.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) In Week 4 of the year, I tried out various ways of using distances in signed distance field fonts.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) In the last post I described how I fell into the font rendering rabbit hole.

Also see my guide to SDF font rendering. (2026) Each week I pick one or two things to work on.

For some time now I've been unhappy with how much more friction there is when posting to my blog than posting to twitter.