Activision flew us out with parachute planes to a remote hotel in Poland, where Eva Braun supposedly lived. We drove army Jeeps and track vehicles through the woods and got ambushed by Nazis, who brought us to a bunker where we played Call of Duty 2 and Big Red One.

Watching Fast X for the first time and this must be the most nonsensical entry in the series. That’s saying a lot, because in F9 they went to space. But this one has a very silly Jason Momoa and a big celebrity cast that knows exactly what kind of movie they showed up for. I love it, sort of.

Unfortunately I no longer live in Holland, so this awesome opportunity to create cool games with Adriaan at his new company is not for me, but it could be for you!

So, unpacking the 360 and installing the game was as far as I got. 😅 Too much other cool stuff to play. Still going to try and play Skyrim this year, but now that I have a Switch 2, it’s competing with Breadth of the Wild.

My most anticipated game for 2026 is so obvious (GTA6, assuming it will release this year) that I’m just going to add a top 3 on top of that: Forza Horizon 6, Wolverine and the Tomb Raider remake Legacy of Atlantis.

Solid advice.

I didn’t play that many games that came out this year, but my 2025 GOTY is without a doubt Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. What an achievement that is for Sandfall and what an experience it was to play. It’s closely followed by Split Fiction, which does some real game dev magic at the end.

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Bad work gums up the gears and slows things down. Clarity of communication is essential for coordination, and both clarity and communication are a lot of work and take time!

Next build!

Took the kids on a trip around Christmassy Copenhagen today and we went inside the gorgeous Marmorkirken for the first time, which looks extra impressive with its cozy Christmas lighting.

Frankly, most game productions are bottlenecked by directors or senior studio leadership – exactly the people who will tell you that their work cannot be replaced with an LLM and who have the power to make it so

We have prepared one little snack before the year's end. 👀 Our latest blog dives into how we approach combat design and what it takes to build a solid foundation for the player experience. ⚔️ Read it here 👇 store.steampowered.com/news/app/223...

I couldn’t pick what part to quote post, it’s just all of this thread. I pride myself on my design writing skills and have been valued for it everywhere I worked. It’s not just putting things to paper, so much thought and design happens while writing. If you didn’t write it, you don’t understand it.

Doing your budgets or schedules with a technology that routinely hallucinates is a terrible idea (as is contracts, legal advice, etc.). Doing docs with AI is making the primary source of truth unreliable for the team and creates ambiguity or conflict, and thus also a terrible idea.

I know he’s only using it as a general example, but when talking about this with artist and writer friends I often say a variation of: genai doesn’t impact me as much as it does you so I can be more nuanced, but the moment someone hands me a generated design doc I will go absolutely nuclear

Most of us did not choose to write or draw or design so that we could put products on the shelf. We chose to do it because it’s a set of skills we enjoy exercising, that give us fulfillment. It’s like asking a pro pitcher to just let a machine pitch for them. Fuck off and give me the ball.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Olivier Richters as Zangief is some on point casting.

Hey Bluesky! Our new small studio just released our first game, a physics puzzle game taking place on a remote planet. Please have a look and see if it might be for you. We'd also appreciate any help to spread the word, and any feedback. store.steampowered.com/app/3965930/... #Indie #GameDev

Video games, man. ❤️ Incredible.

Ready for December to start.

I've never had any issues getting credited (yet), but credit status is completely irrelevant to what goes on my CV. Companies control the in-game credits and shouldn't be dicks about it, I control my portfolio and will accurately list my experience.

ERMAHGERD

I am super obsessed with the football 2026 World Cup qualifiers because it's delivering bangers and upsets like this Scotland - Denmark game regularly. With some pretty strong teams ending up second in their group, the playoffs are going to be interesting.

Yo, I’m dead. 🤦‍♂️

Binged right through the whole season of The Studio. Seth Rogen is great, but I am in awe of the character Sal Saperstein and his actor Ike Barinholtz. Also the amazing occasional appearances by Dave Franco as himself and Bryan Cranston as the eccentric studio owner. Can't wait for season 2!

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.

Every ai video sucks because they’re never more than their prompts, you’re like ‘yeah that’s a video of a dinosaur eating chips whilst skateboarding,” but like that’s it - you could just post your prompt and it’d be the same. But every real piece of film contains MORE than just its script

The shorter games with worse graphics made by less people discourse is starting again and the nuance lost in this conversation is: we absolutely CAN make big, hyper-realistic games, sustainably. The problem -- and the money drain -- is executive pay, leadership overreach, mismanagement, and whims.

I don’t expect video game players to really understand game development, it’s very complicated. But if there’s *one thing* I wish people could get it’s that poor results are much more often due to poor leadership or structure than any individual being “lazy” or “bad” or “woke” or whatever

Today I showed the designers that you can name cells in spreadsheets and use the names in formulas (i.e. "=PLAYER_LEVEL" instead of "=C12"). You can then use the Name Manager to track or rename them. I thought this was common knowledge, but I guess not, so sharing that tidbit here.

After a somewhat scary drive because of the weather, we spent a very wet weekend at the Lego House and Legoland in Billund. Despite the rain, the kids had an amazing time playing with Lego, spending the night in a knights-themed room and having pretty much no lines at any of the rides.

Completed Herdling. It didn’t really grab me as much as some other smaller cozy vibe games, but I grew fond of my little herd of capricorns that I let pick their own names. Daya was indeed a little rascal, always getting things stuck in her fur.

Going from 20 to 30 bucks is just silly. Ultimate was the obvious pick because of cloud and PC and the relatively small price difference. None of that is now true anymore, I’m happy to switch to Essential and at this point only for the online play that I actually need.

Playing Space Marine 2 and I love how your commanding officer tells you “this mission is of vital importance, the survival of humankind depends on it” and then goes…

Just when I thought mobile ads couldn’t get any worse, my son started playing this tablet game that has playable ads WHILE a different clickable audio ad is playing on top. This happens about every three minutes, so he sees more of that than the actual game.

💯

They blamed the WiFi, but the real reason is so much more embarrassing. And funny.

technically Silksong boss nerfs are actually just bug fixes

"Fed into" is such an apt description for this kind of practice.

I am here for a Japan-based Forza Horizon 6 with Tokyo Drift vibes!

I can tell I'm getting old because putting up shelves and trimming the hedge constitutes a good weekend. Every time I look at them and see how level they are, I am content.

I know today is Silksong Day, but here I am refreshing the Xbox page for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle until I can buy The Order of Giants DLC.

Many design decisions on a large team boil down to "what's most consistent with the norms we've established elsewhere". Many design problems boil down to "these things contradict each other". Fun™ design problems are when you need to find the most harmonious way for contradictory things to coexist

Finally, after 5 sessions, with checkpoint resets and strategy refinements, my brothers in arms and I completed The Division’s Iron Horse raid on Discovery! It was magnificent, I will never forget this. It also got me to 100% Achievement completion on the game.

I’m not sure if I’m more interested in seeing more seed art or knowing what the other categories are.

My wife, who has maybe held a controller twice in her life, took my son’s Switch 2 joycon because he needed to eat something and proceeded to completely destroy me and the CPU players in like 3 Mario Party minigames in a row. This needs to be rectified when the kids are in bed.

100% this. Big games can definitely be made faster, but the big gains are in better direction, better production and better management, not faster content development.

So more than 6 years after us releasing The Division 2, I finally completed a raid. Dark Hours, on Discovery difficulty I admit, was a blast to play with a bunch of semi-random funny guys with God knows what builds. Now we’re trying to find a time to tackle Iron Horse together next!