I'm finally writing up how Nanite Tessellation works. The first few blogs posts are up. More will be coming. graphicrants.blogspot.com/2026/02/nani...

holy shit general-purpose n64 game engine and editor just released www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BCm...

This style of light doesn't really appear in animation anymore. You know it when you see it -- it's bright, hot and almost dangerous. Our new issue explores the tricks behind it, and how one artist has revived the look for the digital age: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/dangerous-...

Hello! The IGN Guides team is looking for more freelancers. If you've got published writing or video samples and are interested in working with us, fill out the form below! We don't respond to individual applicants but do keep responses handy for when we need more folks. forms.gle/NhZ7sRJAjAEZ...

This is one of my favorite indie stories because he catalogs life events, money made, prototypes, struggles, etc. It's represented of the majority of indie game developers www.gamedeveloper.com/business/my-...

there are still plenty of people in games who believe this idea that you're not really committed unless you're spending 80 hour weeks making games. it's a lie, and we shouldn't support people's unhealthy and unsustainable attitudes towards how they approach work and live their lives.

any time a successful indie game is made by someone with a totally unhealthy relationship to work and no work/life balance it just creates that expectation for everyone else. you can't make an art scene off of people who are isolating and torturing themselves with work

blue prince is a marvel and a labor of love. creator tonda ros, though, harbors no delusions that he can do it again -- at least, not at the pace he did it the first time

My team can make a game for $500k-$1m. It's challenging, and we barely get by--as you see, I have to do a second job in the form of my patreon to pay my medical bills, and other team members live with family or partners working too. And yet I know publishers who are constantly asking for sub-$500k

This is the problem I have with publishers right now. Every one I've spoken with lately has basically gone "your game needs to be finished and you need to be a guaranteed success before it even gets to us." They want you to spend millions, and they want 40-50% minimum to barely market your game.

I have a friend who worked in TV for nearly a decade; he told me that the budgets publishers are offering these days--and, again, they only seem capable of giving you money if your game already looks like it's finished--is less than the cost of an average 11-minute 3d cartoon. 11 minutes.

I can't say it enough... CAPTURE CAPTURE CAPTURE.....and WISHLIST WISHLIST WISHLIST LOL store.steampowered.com/app/4334030/...

people on reddit keep posting them getting into arguments with chatgpt 5.2 about chatgpt 4o and it just keeps telling them they're unstable and to get a therapist

To make animation as easy as possible, #picoCAD2 comes with a handful of preset curves - ready to use! #3d #lowpoly

2026 basically

I just got a Batman tomagotchi from the 90s. So far all he does is pace around nervously, do pushups, and think about Batman.

The exception, of course, is in industries reliant on venture capital: there they hand you the money for the first 10% instead of the last. So it isn't hard to see why the LLM crowd have made this mistake.

Hey All, I made a header only C++ library (MIT) where line of code inits, then you can start writing to pixels on the screen. I call it thirteen.h, inspired by the simplicity of the 13h days. Examples include a mandelbrot viewer and a playable mine sweeper game. github.com/Atrix256/Thi...

The recording of my Vulkanised 2026 talk is now live 🎥 In this talk, I walk through the journey of bringing a Vulkan RT pipeline into Godot. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HddS... Thanks to LunarG for the opportunity and to the @godotengine.org community for the reviews and feedback.

I've been working on a new painting toy for pixel artists, and I'd love to find a few folks to test it out and give feedback. I'm already having a lot of fun with it. Message me here or email! garrett @ brainfruit . studio

The remaster you didn't know you needed: www.jwz.org/blog/2026/02...

I thought giant monopolistic companies would just continue to lock down their software to make it impossible to not rent from them to use their ecosystem - not that they'd just buy the entire hardware supply so you can't do personal computing lol

the idea that there are dedicated creative communities online has basically disappeared from the mainstream conversation in a way that i find fascinating. i'm not sure if it's that people in positions to talk about this stuff are either simply not aware or just want to pretend they don't exist.

I think the main thing is that juice is a communication tool, you use it to emphasize importance so players can read your game easier. If you use it indiscriminately it just becomes baroque noise instead of feedback. (which can also be fine! but not really what it is good at)

Game "juice" can be important for game design, but I feel people still - after many years - take it as everything must have it, especially UI. You don't need each letter and box to wiggle or tween. Hell, no tweening with instant stops and starts is a completely different, legit kinaesthetic design.

the 3 types of commercially viable videogames

This is probably ok

This is going to happen... a lot. Not just because things like the Steam Deck encourage a minimum viable hardware spec, but because a growing portion of our players cannot and will not be able to access major leaps in hardware. RAM and GPU prices are making the cutting-edge player more rare!

Suggestions for how to do that here, btw: firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph... w/ @nannainie.bsky.social and Peter Zukerman.

How many times, in how many contexts, in how many ways am I going to have to say that this is what "AI" does— what it fundamentally *is*— before it sinks in? That all Bullshit engines do is statistically correlate training data & inputs via their weights to produce outputs you are likely to accept…

The amount of times I sit in a call with a dreamer and their dream game is basically "everything from my favorite six games smashed together into perfect harmony and there was endless flawless content and it has graphics everyone likes" and I have to explain that making feet go on stairs is hard

Was Blue Prince as good as it was because of our vintage magazine subscriptions, where 100% of the proceeds benefit historical video game preservation? I'm not saying yes, absolutely, but I'm not NOT saying it. the-video-game-history-foundation.myshopify.com/collections/...

"Isometric games don't exist" is a guide with 40 detailed charts about perspective in videogames. It teaches you everything about isometry and what all the other game perspectives & projections are and how they work. You can download it for free on my itch page cyangmou.itch.io/isometric-ga...

That's right! Every single "AI tried to deceive us" story is entirely a result of directly training the models to respond in a certain way to create this specific reaction. This era stinks www.wheresyoured.at/ai-mythbuste...

This is a good perspective on the orders of magnitude in the TTRPG publishing industry, and by and large positions us correctly at the bottom-most named tier (while acknowledging that there's a broad swath of indie designers further down). cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2026/02/11/f...

Ep. 152: Walking Over It w/ Gabe Cuzzillo and Bennett Foddy (Baby Steps) Rob, Sarah, Doug, and Andy are joined by @foddy.net and @gcuzzillo.bsky.social to talk about their (with @maxiboch.bsky.social) multi-IGF-nominated, multi-faceted adventure game. secretlives.games/152-walking-...

the people who weren't on cohost for the 5 minutes cohost existed must also learn of Bitch House

I find this question about whether chatbots are “alive” to be truly, truly boring. You can torture a definition of “life” so that it includes chatbots or you can listen to actual, unequivocal flesh-and-blood people talking about harm it does them *right now*.

Anthropomorphizing technology is not new or interesting. Humans have been doing that for thousands of years. There's nothing you're learning except the ways humans create infrastructure

👾 ANNOUNCING 868-BACK! Dismantle capitalism one server at a time in this computer-hacking strategy roguelike game by Michael Brough! Play the free demo in Steam Next Fest on Feb. 23rd! Wishlist on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3304110/...

"Internal feedback on Highguard prior to its reveal "was quite positive," Sobel wrote: There was, apparently, a widespread expectation that the game was a sure-fire hit." Getting playtests and mock reviews done by external partners can be a really good idea.

Today's Load-bearing Tomato addresses the age old question: "why don't the devs just [SOCIAL MEDIA OPINION]" It turns out, "a lot of reasons", but if you never have to test your ideas, you never have to discover why they're not any good. loadbearingtomato.com/p/why-chasin...

new blog post: The future of public game arts festivals and non-commercial games culture, with notes on @free-play.bsky.social / indie games events around the world www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2026/02/the-...

@rdonoghue.bsky.social Exhausted Friends Slowly Realize They Were Playing Board Game Wrong Entire 6 Hours theonion.com/exhausted-fr...

A designer has claimed that “most” of the team behind free-to-play shooter Highguard has been laid off, weeks after it launched. vgc.news/news/designe...

The NYU Game Center's hiring! A senior, tenure-track professor post for an experienced game designer, artist or industry pro with a notable body of creative work. Experience finishing games and mentoring/teaching more important than any kind of academic credential! gamecenter.nyu.edu/were-hiring-...

One of Vanillaware's co-founders (Takehiro Shiga) drew this cool illustration depicting the structure of Chunsoft's most famous sound novels. This was posted around the time 13 Sentinels was entering production, so the devs may have been studying these sound novels while conceptualizing the game.

The steam page for Lancer Tactics is now up! Throw us on your wishlist! #lancerrpg #mech #mecha

Riot Games lays off roughly 80 employees from 2XKO team