Game Engineer with +2 to Charisma. Currently a lead Unity consultant working on [NDA'd] for [AAA studio]. Formerly of YouTube he/they
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B4 logic bros try to agree: Nobody's a Vulcan, we ALL use emotion to make decisions If "cold logic" is your preference for decisions, it's because it makes YOU feel good I didn't make these rules But you can't be born a feeling meat sack and then decide you're a perfect computer afterwards
Someone wrote "rationality is a feeling" and I get where they're going, and I support it, but also no rationality is a practice or set of beliefs about how you come to conclusions you cannot feel "rationality" the gotcha games have gotten to the point that we're bending spacetime now
“Ok, so I can’t make jewelry, but I’m great at disarming an alarm system and smashing glass cases”
God, the Maverick performance was so good.
The code for this is writing itself in my head while I'm trying to do other things and I did NOT consent to this, Brain, thank you.
Great, now I'll be thinking about this the rest of the afternoon. Lol
I imagine you could do (or are doing) the same thing with a tree structure and an ink script: each possible text choice is a separate limb or twig, and the "address" of the node is just the full list of choices it took you to get there.
Yeah, I remember playing with Inklewriter a bit. I'm a systems / networking programmer, so I don't touch many shaders myself, but I know the fundamentals: the system calculates the different permutations of the shader settings, and builds them separately.
I'm imagining a tree structure hidden under what looks like a simple spreadsheet interface. At any point, you might click a cell and say "give me the flow to this point" and it can spit out the text that led up to this moment. But when it's not needed, it's invisible.
Permission to geek, sir: This is electrifying my engineering brain in a massive way. I've been thinking on how one could handle localization for Ink in a more complete, language safe way. Are y'all doing anything like how shader variants work?
I meant to mention when we were talking, I enjoyed your GDC talk this past year.
Something I'm asking myself a lot lately is "am I making this for someone else, or for me?" Neither answer is "right", but it changes how I measure whether it succeeded, and who I'll listen to criticism from.
I felt like the purpose of the book was to make that journey out of anxiety into free creation. So I would say, yeah, it exists. Folks have done it. :)
Have you read The Artist's Way?
Hat tip to the greats who did the reverse (Hitchcock and Janet Leigh, Wes Craven and Drew Barrymore, etc)
Today I PAX. I PAX so much.
People saying Trump is dying or possibly dead, but I for one would urge caution, because it is quite possible a second healtbar will appear as he enters his second phase and a gargantuan centipede will burst forth from his torso, so be careful of his new sweep attacks and toxic buildup from bites.
regardless of what happens to the tariffs, they're doomed from the start because the average conservative holds all three of these positions at once: — virtue signals about supporting US manufacturing — against increasing the minimum wage — buys foreign imports because they're cheap
Raphael is really just an alternate universe Leonardo, if no one respected him. Leonardo is too anxious to be Michaelangelo. Donatello believes he's the smartest one, but actually only Michelangelo has it all figured out.
One of my favorite little projects has been getting AI to generate Campbellian "archetypal" images for a tarot cards experiment. Because it's synthesizing so many sources, AI art is really good at being "strangely familiar", and asking people to interpret them really brings interesting things out.
In that way, AI art will always be a poser. It'll have moments of seeming real and useful, because legions of engineers will pour months into trying to give AI context for our present moment. But time will move on. Context will change. And it'll be back to posing again.
It's impressive, but it doesn't actually *do* anything. It doesn't convey a point of view or an experience. You might not realize that's what art is doing, but it is. And to get that, you have to have someone like you - living in this world, with these experiences - commenting on them.
It's startling to see the first time, because "isn't this new? It's a new work of art!" But it's not. The genius in the box has never touched a paintbrush. It took the shadow patterns from 10k artists, and all the patterns marked "painting," and remixed them back to you.
The genius in the box has never seen light, or color, or a a tree or a rainbow. It's only seen millions of ones and zeros, and someone said "give me a new version of that." So it finds patterns, introduces some randomness, and "summarizes" art back to you.
Tiny tangent on the AI thing: This is why AI art (whether images, or text, or video) has that vaguely alien feel to it. "Generative AI art" is just another kind of "synopsizing what you've seen before." "I'm going to take all these patterns and remix them." Again, the genius in the box example:
*useful beyond teaching, I should say
But I think if you want to solve new problems with original, useful decisions, the genius in the box cannot help you. Because the genius is stuck in the box. They can't know anything we didn't already know.
This is all to say 1. I think AI can be an AMAZING learning tool. Infinitely patient, infinitely capable of repackaging the same idea in different examples. 2. I think AI is great for surfacing solutions people have already found. (A fancy web search basically)
Can it make interesting connections with information that we hadn't noticed before? *For sure.* Patterns are its bread and butter. But it is still bound to what we give it. It can't do anything else. If you want actual progress, a human being has to go out there and make more data.
It doesn't matter how smart the genius-in-a-box is: it can only be as smart as everything you feed into it. That's literally all it has to work with. Nothing comes out of the black box that wasn't put into it.
Our genius-in-a-box knows everything anyone has ever said or written about chicken. Recipes, reviews, etc. But they've never eaten chicken themselves. Or seen one, even. What can they *possibly do* from inside the box, other than tell you what *everyone else* has already said about chicken?
But they are extremely intelligent, in that they can quickly sort and understand patterns in information. So you begin feeding them everything anyone has ever written or said about anything ever. And then you ask them a question. "What's the best way to cook chicken?"
Let's imagine you take an Einstein-level human being, and you disconnect all their external sensing organs. They cannot see, or hear, or feel anything. They don't know they have a body. They've never met another person. They don't know what a person *is.*
I do not think AI is intelligent, but even if it were: I don't think AI can be intelligent in any way that's useful to us. I have actual reasons.
I've had a thing in my head about AI that won't come out right. Maybe it won't come out right here. Let's try.
I'm interested. 🙂
Democrats will do anything to avoid helping working class people.
6/6. Self-care is tedious, but it's a kindness you pay to everyone who cares about you.** ** This won't resonate now, but when your first friend / loved one hits the hospital (or worse) for not taking care of themselves, and there's literally nothing you can do, you'll get it.
5/6. Don't sweat the time you lose figuring out what you want to actually do. That is the cost of riding the ride.
4/6. "What do you want to do with your life" is too big a question to answer. You will never live "a career." You will only live "days." I find it's better to ask "how do I want to spend my *day*", and then I look for the work and communities that support that.
3/6. Age is increasingly irrelevant. Didn't start my first career till I was 30. Have switched up a couple times since.
2/6. Be flexible. "Finding out who you are" isn't a process you get to control. When you realize something's not working for you (it will take awhile sometimes), it's okay to change it up.
1/6. Honestly? It's been largely fantastic. When other folks were afraid to take big leaps, I was afraid *not* to. As a result, I've had many careers and adventures. In general, 8/10 on the whole philosophy.
Today in Society of Play, a fresh-out-of-high-school gamedev mentioned they wanted to "live life so I won't regret it when I look back on it." As someone who decided at 18 to do exactly that and has been doing for the last 20+ years this is what I've learned so far.
Yeah, the shark scene was where I really went, "okay, this isn't going to be a 'safe' experience." 😂
I appreciate your (and everyone's) work on this. It's been a highlight. Don't know how much you can say in a public space, but I would love to know what metric (if any?) y'all used to balance teaching gameplay vs plot vs tone? Because the Fremen quests seem to balance those REALLY well.
I'm not familiar with Gnostic estrangement, what is that?
And building off my posting this on a Discord elsewhere, a brilliant comment in response: "He was so hot you'd have an existential crisis if he stayed over at your place."
Legitimately, people do it. The mobile sound booths you can buy are basically a sponge fort. Some friends who do audio work got started recording in their closet, or recording under a heavy blanket.
I had to really work not to stare, because I'm sure it would have seemed like I was judging, but it was because you never see anime characters in real life. Amazing.
Let me repeat: 1. In the gym 2. Cat person 3. Standing on a can, one footed 4. whipping a rope around in martial arts style. Now let me add: 5. They were *really focking good at it.* Mentally I bounced between "are they on a can, on ONE FOOT" And "Are they doing 90mph ROPE JITSU"
Yesterday I went to the gym and there was a cat person working out. They had cat ears on, and a little cat (fox?) tail on their backpack. They were standing on a metal can (like a can of veggies, on just one foot), doing rope exercises. Think the ball-and chain weapon from Kill Bill.
tl;dr The narrative team at Funcom is absolutely killing it, and if you haven't played the Fremen questlines, you're missing out on some of the best writing our industry has right now. Don't sleep on it.
Spoiler warning for a mid-game quest cutscene, but it's too good not to share. This one was the one that pushed me over the edge. I remember shouting at my screen: "Who told them they could DO this?!" (should be cued up to around 37:38) youtu.be/kT7e0yqQho4?...
It would have been *so easy* to make the Fremen quests "metaphysical babble." But they aren't idle philosophical musings. They're implicit lessons that tell you something about how the Fremen see themselves, AND where they came from, AND critical information about the game.
The Fremen questline has some of the best game writing I've ever seen. Consistently smart and pushing boundaries. I remember starting the first Trial of Aql and it said: >> "Who is it that thinks?" >> "The weight of a kindly God is a fearful thing." Nobody's writing like this.
I regularly pass around the opening cutscene for Dune: Awakenings as "the best in the business." In <3 minutes, it introduces the world, establishes tone, develops intrigue, and lays in one hell of a hook/twist, all with pure virtuoso flair. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlVU...
Just found @leatalbot.bsky.social, @joshuadoetsch.bsky.social and @kristinakraah.bsky.social (three of the members of the Dune: Awakenings narrative team) and this thread is entirely about saying what a phenomenal job they (and the rest of the narrative team) are doing.
(this is no shade to Pattinson, he's also excellent. Charlie Cox was just charming as hell in Clair Obscur)
I still maintain it must have been tough for Robert Patterson when he found out Charlie Cox drives his face better than he does.
Your colleague is publicly harassing one of our staff members on the assumption that misinformation that you published is true, despite us providing you with details descriptions of how our internal systems work in various bluesky threads over the past day. We did not blanket deindex yuri content.
TFW u open BlueSky and a bunch of ppl are vaguely posting about the same shit
I think they're talking about something different: not the animation delays or the long walking, but literally "the RNG won't give me the room I need, so I have to keep doing runs until I can test my solution."
The obsession with "co-creating with ChatGPT" makes me feel like a lotta people would be okay with locking creators up in a black box, poking them for content, and then taking credit, if they could.
How'd we get to the point where "all the stuff that would be unthinkably awful to do on a one-to-one basis is 100% approved if you scale it into a business"?
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results is statistics.
"Clap everyone! Clap to refill your stamina bar!"
Remember, Matt, it's only a monster truck during combat. Before and after, it's a "character truck."
I'm rapidly becoming a Draw Steel fan. I ran it for the first time a couple weeks ago, and the experience was like someone took the parking brake off D&D and stomped the pedal.
I ended up using cheats when I was down to just RNG grinding, and I started solving things very quickly It just felt bad that I felt like I had to break the game to get to play it.
- then 20 other puzzles isn't a blessing, it's an obstacle. It's not a benefit to me anymore. It's hiding the fact that my sudoku puzzle is making me grind to enter the numbers.
1. I definitely see your point, not arguing, but I'd add 2. "Give them lots of puzzles" is terrific to give the players alternatives to solve when *they* get stuck. (It's a classic puzzle game trope) But if I'm stuck because the game's RNG won't let me solve it -
It's like trying to play sudoku with a broken pen. I know the answer, but I have to repeatedly try to write it, in over and over, until the RNG gods "deal" me some ink. Maddening.
Terrific video. I think I'd go further and say the problem isn't just "time" - it's specifically "the amount of time between 'I know the solution!' and 'I can input the solution.'" This is the absolute killer for puzzle games, and it's affected by both slow animations *and* RNG.
It's not that AI is original. It's that our prompts are *extremely not original*, and we don't realize it. It's just a synopsis machine. And it's a great one! But if you knew AI was only synopsizing what the best and worst of us said at some point before, would you trust it with big decisions?
It seems like magic because "wow, it constructed an original sentence and seemed to understand my question exactly!" Not really. It identified the important words in your sentence and tapped into its pattern database to spit back out a pattern it identified somewhere else.
You and I can only identify limited pattern structures in speech, and that's after we're exposed to millions of words. Does anyone here still know how to diagram a sentence? That's all AI is doing. Diagramming sentences, with millions of structural connections.
Hot take: "Generative AI" is really just "Summarizing AI". All it's doing is condensing and rehashing things it has already seen before, based on your prompts. The "magic" of its answers are really in the magic of Big Numbers. 🧵
Sure, you've got anti-cheat protection. But do you have anti-perspirant protection? I need a setting in my MP lobby for "no sweaty gamers, please." Where is my "filthy casuals only" lobby matchmaking?
Scrubs. Possibly Dexter.
The person who invented the video game joystick has disappeared, they down right up and left.
"once we find the genie, we are certain the first thing it will want to do is go live in a bottle on your face."
Oh yeah, that's my understanding, too. But getting to see what they chose to leave out is really interesting. I have never actually watched yet is, I don't want to risk it on a bad VHS player.
I have a bootleg copy of the six hour work print of Apocalypse Now, I just haven't found a VHS digitizer I trust enough to put through it.
Thank you, bluesky, for giving me the moment of zen I needed tonight
Scam.
My game HFTGOOM/He Fucked The Girl Out of Me has been de-indexed by itch. Since I was worried that they might eventually take down my games, I've decided to self host my games on a personal website. You can now find my games here: taylormccue.neocities.org
I'm definitely one of them. I think the Swindle was my first consciously indie game experience, which is like having your first real romantic relatonship. I had been chasing shallow over-polished experiences because that's all I thought there was. And then you meet someone who just *gets you.*
It’s time for our own collective shout. Who are you calling? Remember: Stress you’re a repeat caller on this issue and that you heard about this controversy on the news. With Visa, ask for a supervisor once you hit a dead end. Calls should always last longer than 30 seconds yellat.money
Jay Leno has always struck me as a guy who works constantly because he's afraid of being broke. "Alienating half your audience" because you're ridiculing of fascist behavior strikes me as someone who is playing with scared money.
You know, if you're not actually a bot, but you waste people's time like a bot, on the Internet you are still effectively a bot.
I'll be the idiot: are LLMs constantly being fed news and legal bills? I wasn't aware you could poll LLMs for current events.
#2 would be something like "isn't it hilarious that this guy is out here trying to protest in defense of writing and he can't even spell?" #1 is "we're flawed and beautiful and I love it" #2 is "I'm being a snarky asshole" which, in fairness, are both on brand for you
I can't tell if you're trying to test if I'm a bot, but if so, fair, and I'm waiting for stuff to compile anyway: #1 is "This guy made his own sign, misspelled something but he gives zero fucks. It is awesome to see everyone out here. We're flawed and beautiful and making our voice heard"
I'm legitimately just asking, because I can't tell if you're being sincere or ironic. No offense or attempt to "problematize." Is it "hell yeah fellow misspeller" or "everybody thinks they're a writer, sheesh, get the basics then come back to me"