There are three things that I believe thoroughly melt your brain and should not be done too often. 1: use AI 2: use social media 3: drive a car

They're talking about AI tips in this meeting and I want to die. I'm the only one in my department who hates it. At least our department head said he's not going to monitor usage or prompts to force everyone to use it.

video games are about taking turns and selecting options from a menu

Just saw someone post about how well their vibe coding project was coming along, and it was this. It looks basically like a beginner notepad website from 1998. And yes, he left his IP address in the address bar, I covered it.

Today due to my work schedule I will have to go in at rush hour. Rush hour at my station is already so backed up you can't fit on the platforms. Then the LIRR is on strike, so more people through stations like mine. And it will be 92/33.33 degrees. With no fans on subway platforms. Hellish.

Please leave me behind, I am not interested in the future.

Thinking about that time Poliwhirl was on the cover of time magazine again

So Poland already has insane language requirements to gain citizenship, but now in addition to that they want to almost triple the number of years you have to be there, add another test to prove you're "integrated" and sign a declaration of loyalty. Poland had only 19k gain citizenship in 2025.

I keep trying to bait bluesky with fruit pierogi, but it hasn't worked. Blueberry didn't work, strawberry didn't work. This is the weirdest pierogi I could find: cheese, mango, and passion fruit Trying it later tonight.

Remember when businesses used to do things like make a good product and sell it for money? Instead of capture an audience and hook them on subscription fees and microtransactions and bleed them try as you sit there with no competition and agreements with the competitors you do have?

I want my game to make enough money that I can get my dad and my partner to spend enough time to lend their beautiful art skills to me so I can make something weird.

Rewatching Star Trek TNG and wow Code of Honor is as bad as its reputation. This episode sucks and is racist.

Any advice that starts with "you should do" is in my opinion, bad advice. Warn me about potential pitfalls, make recommendations, that's all fine. Don't tell me what to do or how to do it. I know what I'm capable of more than you do. Advise me, but don't tell me what to do.

On the one hand, maybe I shouldn't have picked like the most challenging genre of game you can make as my first game. On the other hand, I probably would have gotten bored and quit making something easier.

Turning the game replay system into a tutorial scripted battle was really easy. It turns out when you plan what something is for ahead of time, it is easier to make. Who knew?

Damn James Cameron must be over here inventing new technologies, because I sure don't know one that exists that will do this. You know, since generative AI tends to make things slower and more expensive in the end.

Me telling my friend about how there is a city in my game where all the black people have been pushed to the outskirts and have no political power. Don't you think that's a bit aggressive? Bro wait till you get to the city with all the gay trans immigrants.

Imagine you're a straight, cis man. You're attracted to a woman you think is super hot. Then you find out for some proportion of time, this woman had a penis (or still does?). Why is this bad???? Oh no a person I find hot who happens to have firsthand expertise with my sexual organ, how horrible!

Me tossing in a casual line for when you beat this NPC woman about how she hasn't been beaten like that since she was a boy.

I think my game has ended up really unique considering I keep making things up from first principles and working around people who don't know games. Originally my dad didn't understand tile sets, so I worked around it and my game has no tiles. I made a shader to match my partner's art style.

Every time someone is killed by a car, both the driver and the manufacturer should be hit with a massive fine. I bet car manufacturers would figure out how to make safer vehicles real fast once they started having to pay out to the victims of their products.

Tutorial question Would you rather: the computer take the actions in the scripted part of a scripted game? Like after you click through text. Or You click the button for the action, but you're only allowed to click what it wants you to? Noting that the first is so so so much easier to implement.

Indie game devs, when did you start attending festivals for your game? Like, in person ones? Presumably you need at least a demo.

The reason people consider budget in determining indie is that it's not fair to compare someone like me spending years of my free time to a team spending tens of millions on clair obscur. Which is a failure of not enough categories, but indie is all we have for small games. Big ones fit elsewhere.

Playing the Capcom SNK card fighters game on the DS and wow my game is just so much better than this. I had a good time playing this back in the day, but wow this game is not great.

I like how during the NBA ABA merger, the Kentucky Colonel took 3.3 million dollars to fold, while the the Spirits of St Louis negotiated a deal that ended up paying them like a billion ish dollars. They agreed to get 1/7 of each surviving ABA team's TV money, IN PERPETUITY. Bought out in 2014.

My game will now replay and let you continue a game if the most recent game history file is unfinished. If you drag and drop a game history file onto the main menu, it will replay the game but pause at every step for debugging purposes.

I don't think some people quite realize the level of ambition involved in my game. It is essentially "I'm gonna invent a new magic the gathering, build an AI to play it better than any card game before, and then build a full length RPG on top of it" By myself. And I'm done-ish with 2 of those 3.

Imagine that you got a degree in accounting. There is one place you can work. If you screw up a single time, that place can just ruin the last 5 years of work you did and take away all the money. They do not write down what the rules are, and they do not tell you what you did wrong This is steam

Data is my favorite Star Trek character and I'm not sure why everyone is so opposed to the centers he's trying to build?

Every once in a while, someone follows me and it's someone who has been doing game dev since like the 80s and I'm like omg the elders walk among us. It makes me feel like I'm doing something right when one of the people who built this industry follows me.

I should also mention this makes me sad. I look for games like mine because I want to play more games like mine. I guess not having much competition is fine, but it would also be nice to have an actual genre of games to be able to play.

If Star Trek TNG came out today, it would have been canceled after four episodes (Code of Honor was episode 4)

Most indie game devs: it's really tough because there are so many similar games coming out all the time. Me: I dug through steam's releases by date and the most recent game comparable to mine came out April of last year.

They're generating exactly the stuff we all celebrated as uniquely human about Capcom's recent games - all the cool little details like posters and shops and and in-world ads.

I'll never understand the social media mindset of "wow this known bad person said a stupid and/or evil thing, I must share it with as many people as possible" Like, Trump said a crazy thing on his social media site nobody uses, better spread it so it gets lots of attention.

please be normal about videogames they are very hard to make

I landed from Poland about 8 hours ago, and you know what that means. That's right, it's time for indie game dev.

Coming back to New York from a long trip really helps my doom scrolling since my cat headbutts anything out of my hands if I'm not petting him.

You know how planes give a safety demonstration? They should also give an etiquette demonstration. For example: if everyone on the plane but you has their window shade down trying to sleep, everyone should be allowed to throw shit at you

Sure your game might do fancy shader math but my game says play a gif at x coordinates so who is the real game dev here

You know what game I loved? Jade Empire. That game was sick. China KOTOR. I miss BioWare. Too bad they got bought and murdered.

Bad game dev idea number 237: every game has a random pixel on the screen that's the "devil pixel". If you click on it, it either deletes and uninstalls the game, or gives you a steam achievement.

Indie game devs, do you put a demo up before next fest? Or is it just a thing you have for next fest?

I wonder if they'll ever make a pokemon game where the battling is like the show. Where moves actually interact with each other and the environment, and battling is dynamic. I mean, I know the answer is no, but that would be fun.

Same thing with games. The people who play indie games want to know people, not some nameless corporate brand. Just be human, don't just post ads at people.

more broadly: the only solution I have to the problem of too many games / not enough players is to grow the audience, which imo means — market indie more indie games to more people, so that non-gamers come across not just one game they’d like to play, but this one & that one & then another

It's amazing how literally every time I get stuck on a hard problem, I just take a shower and figure it out. It works every single time. That's why I keep notepads in there. And why I shower like two or three times a day.

Sometimes I want to make a Kickstarter but I don't want to do all the work that comes with a Kickstarter

Me: hmm I wonder if it will replay the game fast enough to be able to serve as a load function. *Tries it out* Oh, yeah. That zooms. (Apologize for the choppy video, this computer can't handle an IDE and a screen recorder at the same time. Also no speakers so I'm sure bsky has cursed audio)