This is true and I was the only one on set excited about it (and playing the song on my phone to blank stares)

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "FAST AS HELL: IDTECH8 GLOBAL ILLUMINATION" by @idsoftwaretiago.bsky.social from id Software is now online: youtu.be/VTrdeqMMMK0?... Enjoy!

#SIGGRAPH2025 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course talk recording of "MEGALIGHTS: STOCHASTIC DIRECT LIGHTING IN UNREAL ENGINE 5" by @knarkowicz.bsky.social‬ and @tiagocostav.bsky.social‬ from @epicgames.alt.store.ap.brid.gy is now online: youtu.be/dmmN8_c8Tb0?... Enjoy!

Here’s to 2026

Just gonna say this again for games sphere cus we get the same question: Networking doesn't mean schmoozing up to famous people, it means making friends with your peers. Then in 10 years, 20, one of you might be famous? And sure you're still helping each other cus well yeah friends. Make. Friends.

probably the funniest missing skybox texture i saw while compiling qbj3

Finished reading "A Desolation Called Peace" by @byzantienne.bsky.social , what a fantastic sequel story! This snippet from the acknowledgements should resonate with any creative pursuit - "Each novel requires you to again learn how to write a novel. I am still learning how to write a novel."

Essentially, I think that LLM-generated dialogue only makes sense if you believe that the product of writing is words. But the product of writing isn't words, any more than the product of justice is prisoners, or the product of love is weddings. The product of writing is meaning.

Dear ImGui now embeds a vector/scalable version of the classic font by default, manually subsetted/optimized so it fits in 18 KB (opt-out possible). Embedding ensures easily and readily usable in all contexts. Should default to new one on most setups. Here's a compare of both. #ChristmasMiracle

Vince Zampella, Respawn Entertainment co-founder and the head of EA's Battlefield series, has died at age 55. gameinformer.com/2025/12/22/v...

"we only use AI for coming up with ideas" no you don't. you use AI to come up with the a bland version of other people's ideas. there is currently NOBODY more replaceable than you

The year is 2035. There are three game studios left. Each one produces a game every 10 years, killing 250+ developers in the process. They all accidentally make the same game because they used genAI in preproduction. They sell 500 million units each, missing quarterly targets. Everyone is laid off.

RenderDoc v1.42 is now available! It adds limited support for shader debugging on OpenGL. Note that likely a minority of shaders and not all drivers will be supported. Full release notes: github.com/baldurk/rend... Binary builds: renderdoc.org/builds

NEW from me on @gamedeveloper.bsky.social: I wasn’t going to write about the Larian AI backlash. Then I woke up at 5:30 this morning with a whole dang blog in my head. How can you know if your workers are “okay” with using genAI tools if you have so much power over them should they push back?

Been thinking on the use of GenAi for mood boards. Ethics and legal risks aside, I truly believe using GenAi as references deprives one of many pivotal things. Here’s a blurb on what I mean:

We have to adopt new tech or else our game will fail, which is why all successful games from a few years ago included blockchain technology

Wild news with some massive implications for the video-game industry www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I had to write about Horses for @aftermath.site aftermath.site/horses-indie...

I've been waiting on this one! See how to use our new and immensely powerful GPU profiler in Unreal Engine 5.6+, and how it helps you debug GPU crashes! #uetips www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnbA...

Helldivers 2 on PC has reduced installation size from 154GB to 23GB thanks to support from Nixxes buff.ly/YvXQnW6

Games are constantly under attack for doing things other mediums have tackled for decades as if it's some new taboo. Just watched @charalanahzard.bsky.social video that sums things up more eloquently youtu.be/G-7r9pL0Hqo?... #Indiedev should be talking more about the freedom of the artform.

Part of me feels like Dark Souls wouldn't have caught on if the first game had difficulty settings. It'd be "cheap", "pointless", etc. Arcade games had a relatively granular difficulty option via credit feeding and it played a big part in them written off as "button mashers"/"quarter munchers".

NEW: I spoke to Team Cherry about Silksong DLC, cut content, difficulty settings, storytelling, what they were thinking with Bilewater, the lack of signposting for Act 3, whether they'll do another Hollow Knight game, and much, much more www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

I just find this really sad. Imagine being so certain that you need slop machines to do your work, that you convince yourself that EVERYBODY must need them.

Here's some cute bounding box functions for 2D shapes. A longer list here: iquilezles.org/articles/bbo...

Please look at this. *Really* look at it. And realise that even if you do insist there are issues with the data, or try to "Ah, but ~of course~ NPC soldiers should be men!" it away, any result that even vaguely resembles this chart should still be considered shameful. This is 30+ years of stories.

We did something different with the credits for Demonschool. We used this format: name, title, lengthy description of what they did. Often you see credits in games where you don't know what the credited developer was actually responsible for. We wanted to give people proper, actual credit.

having a normal one right now

The amount of people I know who have been laid off from games industry jobs and are deciding to leave games entirely as a result is not only extremely saddening (of course), but also genuinely scary. We have lost legitimately thousands of years of knowledge and experience in the last four years.

#Dispatch devs have no interest in using AI for game development 🎮 "AI feels like a production solution, not a creative one. Maybe it's a creative one if you aren't creative" "Whatever we're building, it has to connect. It's got to be made by people. It's got to connect to people" (via GIBiz)

1st day of the Graphics Programming Conference ‘25 #gamedev www.graphicsprogrammingconference.com

When #UE5 first released, I made these images to explain to folks how #Nanite would help with rendering something... ludicrous.

finding out your game got nominated by The Game Awards in the group chat with other folks who got laid off is… just so painfully 2025

In gamedev, if you're using a placeholder asset, best practices involve marking it as placeholder so garishly and offensively clearly PLACEHOLDER that you can't possibly miss it. Also flagging that asset in the dev process so it can be identified quickly before the final build.

It really needs to be pointed out how every one of these embarrassing statements is made by a c-suite executive and not an artist or even art department lead

Insulting to the players, insulting to the IP, insulting to the medium, the developers. And the craft itself. Fuck you executives who pushed this garbage. frvr.com/blog/call-of...

We don’t use generative AI at Strange Scaffold and I can confirm that a *lot* of other studios are not—whether indie or AAA. Get outta here with this normalization bullshit.

Announcing: New @steampowered.com Hardware, coming in 2026: Steam Controller Steam Machine Steam Frame.  Watch our jazzy announcement video and wishlist now: steampowered.com/hardware

We just released "Unreal Materials: New Features & Productivity Enhancements", where my coworker @shedoesartstuff.bsky.social shows off a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to the Material Editor in UE in 5.6/5.7, alongside new and upcoming features. #uetips www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYmd...

NEW: Big layoffs at Final Fantasy maker Square Enix, which is shrinking its US and UK offices as it looks to cut costs and consolidate publishing operations in Japan. Exact number isn't clear but the company says it will save $19.6 million due to the cuts www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

BREAKING: Rockstar has delayed Grand Theft Auto VI again, pushing the highly anticipated game from May to November 19, 2026. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

www.videogameschronicle.com/news/square-... I imagined trying to get through bug reports written by an LLM and immediately got an honest to god headache. What do you mean I can’t even go back to the person who wrote it and ask for more details because there isn’t one, but it can still make shit up?

Everything about making video games is harder than you think.

I interviewed with 20 studios in 2023 before finally finding a home at CDPR. Studios closed, projects got canceled, devs got laid off. As of today, only 1 of those roles remains. It's a wild time in the games industry

Take-Two's CEO has spoken out on AI, saying "genius is the domain of human beings", and raising copyright and creativity concerns. "There is no creativity that can exist by definition in any AI model, because it is data-driven." (Read more: Eurogamer)

The rumor I had always heard was that they hired a bunch of game developers and didn’t listen to them, which seems to be an ongoing trend. Maybe someone should try making video games and trusting the people who know how to do it.

🎄 Introducing our paper A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination lnkd.in/gQUMSAyV . 🙈 Just as Transformers learn long-range relationships between words or pixels, our new paper shows they can also learn how light interacts and bounces around a 3D scene.