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I. INTRODUCTION
This article is intended as an introduction to all the basic mathematical concepts you will need
to understand for game development. It will make the assumption that you are someone who
maybe was never particularly good at maths, or who took maths classes so long ago that you can
barely remember them. Basically, I will not assume much prior knowledge of mathematics.
This guide obviously has it’s limitations; I will not be going into massive depth on any of these
subjects, or treating them with a high degree of rigour. So if you want to get some more details on
any of the topics introduced here, I’ll be providing a reference list at the end.
I’ll wrap up this section with a little bit about myself. I am currently studying physics at
university, in my third year, so maths is like a second language to me (I’m not very good at learning
actual languages, though, unfortunately). I want to go into full-time game development once I
graduate, so I’ve been programming in my spare time, and there are a lot of cases where I have
come across other devs saying “I wish I understood matrices” or “what the hell is a quaternion?”.
So I decided to make this in the hopes that it would help someone out at some point.
Now, on to the meat of the article.
II. TRIGONOMETRY
I’m sure many of you have traumatic memories of high school trigonometry lessons. That is
fair enough, but trig lies at the heart of a large amount of game development, and maths as a whole.
So you are going to have to take this bull by the horns at some point. I will try to cover it in as
nice a way as possible, though.
Firstly: what is trigonometry? Well, it ultimately stems from the study of geometry, specifically
triangles. The overall idea is to relate angles to distances and vice versa. There are many different
trigonometric quantities, but there are six that you need to know about: sin, cos, tan, arcsin,
arccos, and arctan. They may sound very intimidating, but in reality they are pretty simple, if you
have a diagram to help, that is. If you turn your attention to Figure 1, you will see a construction
called the “unit circle”. The word “unit” is one that crops up all the time in maths; it basically
means “length = 1”. So the unit circle is a circle with a radius of one. Specifically “THE” unit
circle is the circle with radius one, and centred at the origin of whatever coordinate system you are
dealing with.
