Right now I'm playing a 2D souls-inspired metroidvania sequel. That's right, I'm playing Ender Magnolia which I'm really enjoying. Wait did some other game come out? store.steampowered.com/app/2725260/...

To focus on the important part: Trump has ordered every state's national guard to organize dedicated units devoted to "quelling civil disturbances" which is a terrifyingly vague goal

This chart from the Google Cloud report shows how #AI is being used right now in #GameDev. I think only the first and last items on this list would really be considered "Using AI" to the average game player:

Here's an interesting report on using #AI in #gamedev, but you should click through to read the report because the headline is a bit deceptive. They are counting all development of games with procedural generation or dynamic difficulty as using AI agents: www.gamesindustry.biz/87-of-game-d...

I bought myself a new PC today even though my current one is working fine. I'm guessing prices will start to go up fairly soon for enthusiast PC parts because of www.reuters.com/world/china/... as the smaller companies won't know be able to suck up to Trump the way that Apple/Nvidia are now

I just 100% completed Death Stranding 2 on normal, Platinum and all milestones. It was the perfect game to play over my last few weeks of semi-vacation. Good mix of Kojima bullshit and satisfying deliveries. If this whole programming thing doesn't work out, maybe I should be a logistics manager.

Saw credits for Death Stranding 2 and I kind of just want to play more as it opened up a bunch of other content. It turns out I really like a mix of logistics challenges and Kojima-style bullshit. The plot still doesn't really make sense but the cutscenes were all pretty great

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

Matt Turnbull, Executive Producer at Xbox Game Studios Publishing - after the Microsoft layoffs - suggesting on Linkedin that may maybe people who have been let go should turn to AI for help. He seriously thought posting this would be a good idea.

The Republicans just passed the worst tax bill in decades, which is very bad but is also an opportunity to point out all the ways they have betrayed their own constituents. Voters will not be happy with this bill when it starts to actually change the way they live in America

AI in the wild? This tray tissue I was given at a restaurant is full of errors and hallucinations…!

Just saw credits on Expedition 33 (not done with side stuff), and the last few hours of that game are amazing. There was a certain narrative point where I kind of wanted to stop playing, but a few hours after that the pace picks up and doesn't really stop until the end

I'm trying to comment on this without being hyperbolic. As a manager, insisting on deadlines that you and your ICs straight up don't believe are possible almost GUARANTEES that a) their work will be thrown out or completely redone and b) you will put them in danger of burning out.

Introducing Snap & Grab - the new game from No Goblin where you get to do cool crimes using just your camera and your crew! youtu.be/26GgiiiP5Po

Great video about the tech of the #UnrealFest demo yesterday, Digital Foundry isn't easy to impress. They also talk about some of the compromises needed to hit 60fps on a PS5 and some areas for improvement in the future

The full 4k capture of The Witcher 4 tech demo at #UnrealFest shows off the great content that @cdprojektred.com built and the Unreal Engine improvements that are available to all games (most of them are in 5.6). Yes this is a smooth 60fps on a real PS5: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aorR...

I can personally confirm that demo was 100% realtime and in engine. Some of it was on rails but the part in the middle was real movement and town gameplay with lots of simulation happening in the background. This will be a lot closer to the final game experience than other demos I've worked on!

Also looking forward to Ari's presentation, I helped out with the research for this and there's more improvements on the way

Spent the last day before vacation debugging a weird issue where garbage collection caused a large game thread stall exactly 1% of the time. Pretty sure that's fixed properly now, and I'm looking forward to watching the State of Unreal presentation next week www.unrealengine.com/en-US/state-...

Just saw credits in Assassin's Creed Shadows and overall really enjoyed it. Felt a bit disjointed like basically every AC game, but I loved exploring the world. Definitely made me excited to go back to Japan later this year

My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.

Was at a conference dinner a while back and one guy said "The future is AI. It doesn't replace senior developers, but no more need for juniors." To which i replied: "Where do you think senior developers come from. Straight from the womb?" He went quiet, then wandered off to a different huddle.

A few people have asked me about the details of contracting, so I wrote up a basic guide for the legal/business aspects of starting a consulting company. I'm no expert, but knowing some of this stuff before I started would have saved me some time and stress: medium.com/@jzig/starti...

I really need to make it to Revision one of these days, relive my teenage years of making mediocre tracker music

I was just introduced to Pat Finnerty, and if you enjoy well produced funny videos about why modern country/pop songs suck, I highly recommend his stuff: www.youtube.com/watch?v=memX...

Big crowd at the #handsoff protest in Raleigh today, including a lot of vehicular support

Not content with only destroying human lives, Trump wasn't happy until he also screwed up our video games

🚨Signal boost!🚨 If you worked at Blizzard from 1997-2006, specifically on StarCraft, Diablo, or WoW, I want to talk to you about Mark Kern. Same goes for Red5 employees. Our convo can be fully anon if you prefer, and we can chat via Signal, phone call, vid chat, whatever!

The intro to Assassin's Creed: Shadows features a beach that kinda looks like the Death Stranding one, so I've decided they're in the same fictional universe

Beat Avowed last night and really enjoyed it! Combat and exploration are both top tier for a first person ARPG. There are a few different ways to role play the main story and character interactions, but I went with "most powerful therapist in the world" which matches my own instincts.

In 25 years of covering national security, I’ve never seen a story like this: Senior Trump officials discussed planning for the U.S. attack on Yemen in a Signal group--and inadvertently added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

I'm planning my travel for the rest of the year after putting it off for weeks. My anxiety about everything isn't making it easier, but if I'm going to be worried about the world anyway I might as well go enjoy some of it! I could use a change of pace and international travel is great for that

I was not prepared for Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza to suddenly turn into a FMV dating sim

They're called public records for a reason. Starting today, WIRED will *stop paywalling* articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, becoming the first publication to partner with @freedom.press to offer this for our new coverage.

This should terrify every person in this country. The use of machine learning systems to approximate an individuals views on war and then, if they are here lawfully on a visa, tag them for deportation is about as sci-fi dystopian as it gets. www.axios.com/2025/03/06/s...

Two of my notable Avowed achievements, I know that everyone likes mystery fungus drugs but I thought more people would have gone for the easy profit opportunity! The necromancers seemed like cool dudes to hang out with.

governments should spend money, literally all their fucking money. on taking care of the people from whom they got the money. on building cool shit for the people from whom they got the money to use, like highways and public works. this is real easy how can these people be so bad at this

Trump is effectively threatening to kill all scientific research and higher education in America, because he is afraid of a few college students

I am expressing my opinions about the current state of the US by uploading totally legitimate files to the official "End DEI" web form

To be clear, the Trump administration is aggressively purging all transgender individuals in the military, even if they have been stable for years and are in critical roles. These waiter criteria don't make any sense, they're just there to sound like it's possible to get an exception

The Washington Post is now officially libertarian propaganda. We'll see how much of that is effectively Trump/Musk propaganda, but either way it's not something it makes sense to support with a subscription

Worked on my taxes today so I can file early this year. Honestly who knows what will happen in the next month and this is the one part of my relationship with the federal government that I have any control over, so I might as well do it now

Let's Go! #ibashocon day 2!!! Come play some homegrown NC indie games @briledozer.bsky.social @ibashocon.bsky.social

This isn’t drugs. This is him assuming other people don’t work because he doesn’t do that much work. Very common bad boss behavior. bsky.app/profile/rcma...

Today is the @romchip.bsky.social 12-hour fundraiser stream! We're raising money all day to support game history research. And your donations to enter you into a raffle to win game history books! twitch.tv/romchipjournal

Today at 5pm EST I'm doing a bootleg streaming of Kinoautomat, the first interactive movie from 1967! It's part of a fundraiser for @romchip.bsky.social - a game history journal. Starting soon, links and full schedule here: donate.romchip.org

Games like Pacific Drive are caught halfway between the AAA vs Indie conflict that a certain group of Gamers love to obsess over. The truth is that mid-level or AA games can be very innovative and successful and it's great to see that called out publicly.

Microsoft can't even ship the games that already have solid ideas behind them, what good is an AI tool that just spits out... more ideas? Also they're going to train it on their own games, so they're just going to get more games like... the games they already made?

Great turnout at the People vs Griffin rally at the North Carolina State Capitol, to protest Republican efforts to cancel legal votes for the State Supreme Court election. The Raleigh #50501 Presidents Day protest is right after this

Join us at the Raleigh Capitol for 3 protests today! At noon, Swing Left and Common Cause NC are protesting Griffin. At 3pm, the organizers of 50501 are hosting the We The People Protest (previous communication was noon but confirmed it begins at 3pm) see you there!