Where to Go Next

This course's guided material ends at Phase 5. Here's where capable, still-curious learners go from here, all outside the Lisp world this course has lived in so far, deliberately, since the whole point of Phase 3-5 was giving you enough vocabulary to read any game codebase, not just Lisp ones.

If you want to go deeper on architecture

Game Programming Patterns by Bob Nystrom, free online. You already met its vocabulary in Phase 4: Game Loop, Component (ECS), and Object Pool; the full book covers 19 patterns across five categories, classic design patterns revisited for games, plus sequencing, behavioral, decoupling, and optimization concerns. Read it once you hit your own "this doesn't scale" moment in a project, that's when each chapter actually lands.

If you want to go deeper on "close to the metal"

Handmade Hero (Casey Muratori), not a structured course, deliberately: 600+ episodes of building a full game engine from raw C, one hour at a time, explaining every decision live. This course's raylib-first, thin-FFI, no-black-box philosophy is the same spirit at a much smaller scale, Handmade Hero is what that philosophy looks like taken all the way down.

If you want a structured multi-week project

RoguelikeDev "Does the Complete Roguelike Tutorial" - an annual, community-run 8-week event: grid movement → procedural dungeon generation → field-of-view → turn-based AI → items/inventory → save/load → difficulty scaling → polish. Phase 4 gave you a taste of procedural generation and simple AI; this is the full structured version of that ladder, with a whole community doing it alongside you.

If ECS specifically hooked you

ecs-faq (SanderMertens) - an FAQ-format deep dive that goes well past what Phase 4's herfi lesson could cover: archetypes, sparse sets, query performance, real production ECS design trade-offs.

If multiplayer specifically hooked you

Awesome-Game-Networking - a curated list covering the concepts Phase 5's herfi capstone only gestured at: client-side prediction, entity interpolation, lag compensation, reliable-UDP.

If you just want to see (and build) more finished games

awesome-game-remakes and osgameclones.com: curated lists of open-source game remakes and clones, several with no paid assets required, i.e. genuinely cloneable this weekend.

One more thing

Everything in this course was built from real, shipped code in this ecosystem's own repos, not textbook examples. If you build something worth sharing, the games in Track B started exactly the same way someone else's Phase 2 exercise did. Ship it.