Design Director at System Era. I post a lot of brunch photos. she/her.
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I know exactly what happened during the day that led to my subconscious inventing this. I saw a viral hoax-ish video on soaking blueberries in salt water to expel live bugs. I played Silksong, which involves a cute little singing bug. And then my brain did something with it.
Last night I dreamt that I gave a basket of blueberries a bubble bath and sang to them.
Not really, there's a dash you unlock that helps with that though. Game is pretty hard overall.
I don't really like metroidvanias because I don't really have the skill/patience for action-platforming anymore, but the bug game is pretty good.
yeah dish soap is the secret unstated ingredient
since they are always built by a rich old guy, I humbly suggest a sugar daddy puzzle mansion
Usually for the sake of dealing with being stuck on a puzzle and setting it aside to come back to later. Similar to metroidbrainia in that way.
That is wild, nothing anyone described to me about those games would imply there is any puzzle in them. My mental model was closer to (forgive me) a serious gamer’s Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion.
Sibling but not direct descendent I think. It’s got to have a layer of artifice to the puzzles that is presented seriously to the player but is, in fact, ridiculous. Finch is all about gameplay metaphors so imo surpasses it as an artform.
I have never played a Resident Evil game. Are they… are they full of puzzles and no one told me?
I found the design doc I wrote for my cannibal dating sim idea from 2016 and happy to say it still has the juice
ah yes, there we go!
I am cleaning up old notes/files I have and came across this banger, is there an overly cute word for this genre yet? It’s not metroidbrainia, it’s more specific than that.
I forgot my brother left me some beers so I think I’ll try those next if they are still not drowning.
I've upgraded from apple cider vinegar traps to a cocktail of balsamic vinaigrette, red wine, soy sauce, and strawberry slices. They are either going to be very dead or extremely well fed.
I have been fighting fruit flies for the last week, and I think I accidently bred super fruit flies that are impervious to my traps.
referring to metroidvanias as "hollowslop" to simultaneously piss off people who like metroidvanias, people who like hollow knight, people who want a better genre name for "metroidvania", people who are sick of the word slop being misused, and gradius fans who want to see more checkpoint recoveries
I accomplished neither but I did pave the floor of my tavern in gold and feed a couple dozen goblins to a forgotten beast.
My goal tonight is to dig too deep in Dwarf Fortress and finally see what happens, but I will probably get distracted by trying to get indoor plumbing working instead.
my wfh snack game is still going strong
I finally watched Sinners and oh I wish I knew it was folk horror because I would’ve seen it sooner.
the being eaten alive by beetles part was unnecessarily thorough though
I should add that our joints all squeaked like plastic action figures so we should’ve known were we made of plastic
honestly not bad, pretty proud of the logical coherence my subconscious displayed for once
last night I dreamt that we engineered a beetle to eat plastic and everyone clapped as we released it into the wild only to soon realize it was too late, humans were already 80% plastic from the microplastics in our blood, and the beetles ate us like a kind of biblical plague
I am not at PAX but our game is!
love maps, 7/10 and goes up depending on gameplay and decoration elements
love to feel like a jet engine is about to crash into my house once every few minutes
just let out a long "ohhh nooooo" because I forgot it was labor day weekend and it's noon and the jet flybys are already starting over my apartment
dnd update: one of the players now has a third eye growing out of the palm of their hand, in exchange they were cursed slowly become a hideous, unsightly gorgon to be shunned from all others and whose ghastly appearance turns others to stone, but they think that's neat
I was really determined to relearn the controls because my choices are "spend an extra 4 hours each night at the same computer I work at during the day" or "spend that time lounging on the couch with snacks and a horror movie". There was no middle ground. I was completely locked in.
I trained everyone as doctors
what is this embark?????
where the hell did this giant hamster come from
Going to put them all in a pit with my captured goblin invaders and eat whatever is leftover after the fight.
Also angry mountain goats also attacked. How could I forget them.
First it was angry giant coati, then giant chinchillas, then giant blue jays, then another wave of chinchillas. I am now besieged by angry hoary marmots.
I owned "Item_Rewards.xlsx" and I never changed the name even though it outgrew its intended purpose because it was funny for new people to discover that every piece of unlockable content for a AAA open world game was tracked in it.
It's Minnesota State Fair time! It's time for Minnesotan folk art! Here, for example, is Saturn Devouring His Corn, in the seed art category!
I swear I posted and THEN scrolled my feed to you ruminating on player stories
the term I came across (which comes from outside of games) is “tellability” and it led me down some great rabbit holes
oh turns out it was fleeing the giant blue jays which have descended into my fort and murdering everything everything in this embark is cute, giant, and extremely agitated
a giant chinchilla is vomiting all over my trading post
I have not but it’s beautiful!
Watch The Shrouds and leave it to David Cronenberg to come up with a plot like “they hacked the gravestones”.
I am using the default fortress controls but did make a few adjustments to remap camera panning and remove another because I was finding myself unpausing it accidentally. Otherwise it just took a bit of time. I will probably tweak it more.
Unfortunately my new fortress is constantly being attacked by giant chipmunks.
It took a six hour train ride but I can now fully play Dwarf Fortress on my steam deck.
100% about real world cannibalism
Revisiting The Door Problem With Liz England - Game Developer Podcast Ep. 53
Spending the weekend with a bunch of game designers and my favourite moment is when a peer turned to me in all seriousness and asked, “I have a question about cannibalism.” This is when I know I have found my people.
Ooo, I hadn’t considered a start that radically early.
One day I will tame a dragon, but first I need one to spawn in the world and visit me lmao
house flipper but it’s the site of a grisly murder has been at the top of my pitch list (I believe there’s been a couple attempts at this so far)
so in dwarf fortress when the goblin siege comes I pull up the drawbridge and route them through a gold-paved statue-lined maze of horrific traps, and after they all die I send in my dwarves to clean up and loot the bodies so I guess this game already exists
a game where you design build and take care of a hedge maze garden, pruning it, planting flowers, making a cozy little spot for a minotaur, cleaning up after the youths’ grisly deaths
maybe some things shouldn't be cake, gretchen.
This is a bit off topic because it is a movie, but Steven if you like lovecraft I highly recommend the film The Endless. It's a perfectly executed modern lovecraftian story (with all of the cosmic horror and none of the racism).
Today I said "what if I was a game design student now?" and turns out my top pick US grad school is 12x the cost of my not-quite-top-pick Canadian grad school and I am unable to mentally comprehend this.
Grats to the liberals for turning what could have been "a strike" into "labour leaders are declaring they'll go to jail as martyrs for the cause" I guess www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
dwarf fortress continuing to deliver with a juxtaposition of "horrible danger has arrived!" and "look at this cute sprite art, all this kid does is murder turkeys"
The #HugoAward for Best Game or Interactive Work goes to Caves of Qud.
For reading? Laird Barron is great at this but some of his work can be a but hard to get into - I really liked The Croning, he also has some great short stories. But also if you want something horror that also subverts Lovecraft directly, I highly recommend The Ballad of Black Tom.
how is there still two hours left in this napoleon biopic? it defies all reason, I feel the more I watch the longer the film gets, the Book of Sand finally realized in film
HMMM pacific time zone I imagine?
If you're playing rock, paper, scissors against a Republican, pick paper. www.pbump.net/o/how-to-win...
Join us for: - a peek at the 2025 Roguelike Celebration social space - a fireside chat with @perryjon.bsky.social about design & proc gen in UFO 50 - @apepers.bsky.social talking about Designing for Systems Suspense - @ezra-szanton.itch.io talking about Synergy Webs in Roguelike Deckbuilders
My guess is almost certainly a summer sale. I definitely picked up a whole ton of bangers over the course of a week.
It is interesting to me that I have had steam since 2007, but only averaged 3-6 games a year until July 18, 2013 where, like spiders georg, I suddenly bought 27 games.
Since it's the most recent topic: the earliest games I picked up on steam that aren't made by valve are: Psychonauts, World of Goo, Magicka, Deus Ex, and Amnesia Dark Descent. I gotta say I had great taste.
As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...
it took five years but my headset has decided to completely disintegrate all at once, like a witch cursed it to suddenly age ten years in a day
it's a gift
saw my coworker's dogs lounging around behind him on this group call so I shouted over the mic, "want to go for a walk? what to go out???" happy to say it worked
my brain is absolutely convinced that it is friday this is going to be a very long week
yes
The worm was purely coincidental but always in the back of my mind, especially since they met him at the same time the news hit.
the only one they actually like is the alcoholic satyr, who is so beloved one of the players ran a one-shot about his backstory last xmas for us they are dragging him along with them to the final villain's lair presumably for entertainment purposes, also they gave him their flask of endless beer
dnd update: we're close to the end so the players rallied with their newly forged allies before the final showdown their allies: an alcoholic satyr, a political centrist that almost got them killed, a goblin whose brain was eaten by a worm, a worm, a demon that eats children, and six children
We're excited to announce that applications are open for the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant 2025 🎉 The grant will award $15,000 to five thinky puzzle game developers from all over the world, and a year's mentorship with genre veterans. Deadline: September 28th More info 👇 grants.draknek.org
Every six months I pick up Dwarf Fortress again, and now they've released lua scripting for modding and it's taking all my willpower not to crack that open to see just how hard it is to add a few hundred more animals and monsters to the game.
😈 Announcing Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists, a procedural narrative RPG by A Sharp @radiofreelunch.bsky.social and published by us! ▶ Wishlist the game now on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3794210/...
Yeah, it's sarcasm! Subscription models are much rarer now, players mainly expect free games with optional one-time costs or season passes. Social deduction games are great but a niche genre that doesn't hold up the weight of all the costs related to genAI.
Yes, exactly. The constraints of a game are part of what makes it fun - a game with no rules is a toy that provides no challenge to overcome, nor anything meaningful to say, nor a way to differentiate from other games with a clear identity of its own. (This is a simplification but you get the idea).
Yes, this is why I talk about genAI and LLMs here and not procedural generation or more broad concepts in games related to AI.
Oh yeah. I know ONE use case that does not exist yet but was a very good application but I will not speak the words into being because I don't want to encourage it. It's why I stick to evaluating what already exists and their strengths/flaws (conveniently, it's mostly flaws).
Yeah, I know a lot about this space - I have a ton of comparison points and usually point out that LLM-powered narrative content in games fails in quality when compared to authored story content. Even when looking at advances in UX/interface, there are better solutions.
For comparison, I have also played a bunch of crypto blockchain powered metaverses and looked at a ton of NFT games. Right now in my experience the ratio of "overpromised hype that doesn't exist" and "actual cool thing that functions and is playable" feels roughly the same to me.
This is not me supporting these kinds of games. I have some genuine curiosity, but I think it's mostly overpromised hype and deeply unethical, with a rare spot every once in a while of something interesting that is better considered a one-off experiment than a revolution.
btw, if you know of games that have released or have a demo (promises and trailers don't count) that claim to use LLMs as part of gameplay, I'd love to know (in thread or DMs) so I can add it to my research into the state of genAI in game design, especially if it's not on Steam
They are not pre-rendered voice lines? I had assumed they were using LLMs for asset creation, not live. (It seems way too risky for a AAA studio to release a multiplayer game played by kids where you use a genAI prompt live, but they do keep surprising me by how little they care about brand safety)
I think a big red flag is that there are a number of established parser-based text game devs who are highly interested in the pairing of technology with narrative, and none of them have jumped on ChatGPT (I don't think it's fit for the purpose, but even if it were, it is unethical to use)
I saw someone mention this in a thread on reddit when I was looking for games but couldn't find the actual game. Thank you for the link, I will add it to my queue to investigate.
ty for reminding me about this one, I didn't play at the time because of the sign up / beta access process.
oh I am excited to read this, my biggest complaint about 1001 Nights is that the devs are very smart and intentional about their work, but just won't talk about the ways it doesn't work, which is the most interesting thing about it.
I think Infinite Crafting is very clever and fun, but I prefer Little Alchemy, the hand-authored version of this. I can't help but look at Infinite Crafting as an inexpert clone of a very well designed game, kind of like 2048 was to Threes. (I worked on Little Alchemy 2 so I am deeply biased here)
Using generative AI for UGC kind of blurs the line for "genAI as gameplay". It's really just more asset creation workflow, like generating text or art that you then edit or integrate into the game, but instead of them being development tools they are player editor tools.
There's some games out there using generative AI in order to allow players to create UGC, like inZOI (which I have not played). I suspect we will see a lot more of this in games, though I unsure of how many of those games will be big successes vs. niche, mostly abandoned metaverses.
I've still only found two games that are out (or have demos) about collaborative storytelling with genAI - 1001 Nights and AI Dungeon. Two of the more thoughtful games using LLMs, but both of these are, IMO, gameplay failures. Novel ideas, interesting tech, no lasting impact, bit more like gimmicks.
