As it's National Dog Week, let’s introduce our beloved new companion, Agent K! A pooch with a punch and certified good boy. And yes, you can pet the dog!

Made some substantial progress on a new game dev project today - hope to start sharing what we're working on fairly soon. It's been a while but it's good to be embarking on another thing!

Ask bus driver for general destination / name of major road: "Where?" Ask bus driver for specific stop name: "Where?"

The single stupidest era of indie game discourse and that's a hotly contested category

If you're making a game that you think has franchise / DLC / spin-off / licensing potential then focus on *that one core game first* to prove out all of those things.

Semi-colon frame cancel into em-dash is plus on "no"

Gibson is an all-time great namer of things...nomenclaturist? Neologist? I'm not as good as him at it

"I don't control the railways or the flow of commerce" is genuinely one of my favourite jokes in any movie

‪This California Games 2 game over screen goes extremely hard.

In case anyone is wondering how it's going on Twitter I just saw a San Francisco person describe $20m net worth as "only enough to live somewhat comfortably"

Bring Her Back is *very* good if you like narrative-driven horror and also hearing other people in the cinema having a bit of a tough time

Hope everyone in the UK pushing for increased regulatory involvement in the games industry is enjoying the Online Safety Act this weekend!

When people enjoy AI art you can't convince them otherwise by repeating the word "slop" and lecturing them about their taste. We need to collectively drop "people will never like this because it has no human soul" nonsense and focus on the actual problems with AI, of which there are many.

Ray is rad and it's already been a huge pleasure to add a little bit of input to this very cool thing he is doing! There will be a lot more to show and talk about soon.

One ticket. Play all summer. For the first time ever, we’re introducing a new offer - unlimited visits to the National Videogame Museum from 24th July to 1st September. ✅ One ticket ✅ Unlimited visits ✅ All summer long! 👉 Tag someone who needs this in their summer plans! thenvm.org/playallsummer/

Digimon deserves to escape Pokémon’s shadow

Publishers should respond to Stop Killing Games by figuring out better ways to do long-term support and by clearly communicating cases where that may not be viable. This isn't a good case for regulation as legislators tend to have a horrible time dealing with the nuances of video game development.

Not exactly sure why but this has been by far the most popular design diary for Amberspire. If this was the first one you read or it caught your attention over the others, is there a particular reason?

AMBERSPIRE 🌇 The Armorer Its golden rooftop making it unmissable in your ever-growing city, the Armorer can produce several different resources for you to build with or trade for Influence. Its outputs include Wax and Roil, two of the rarer resources in the game.

Will be heading down to Brighton for Develop and looking to chat to publishers and/or marketing folk about my game Pachinko Party: store.steampowered.com/app/3093410/... I have a strong vertical slice and want to find the right partner to bring it to release. If that's you, please reach out!

Leftfield submissions are now open for EGX London, Oct 24th-26th: airtable.com/appIQDFmYU3o...

A lot of game pitches at the moment seem to be very light on *why* someone would specifically check the game out or want to play it? What is the game GIVING the player - "it's sort of in this category" is not why people play things.

The absolute desperation for revenue at any cost from indie tech developers vs the almost pathological avoidance of intentionally trying to generate revenue from indie game developers is quite fascinating

"Your pathetic definition of the word 'retro' seems to be based on nothing more than frivolous *vibes*! My science-based approach however..."

*emerges blinking from cave, waving gnarled stick* One thing I've learned is that you absolutely do not get to decide when and how your generation's retro window opens. You just start having to navigate nostalgia culture at a certain point and the only thing you can decide is how to respond.

I think it's so strange and interesting that for years games chased frame perfect responsiveness but these days a lot of the combat and movement interactions people like have these cumbersome clunky long animation startups

Wrote about doing things in the right order when designing a game - open.substack.com/pub/modecoll...

There's an EMU Orbit in Eyes Wide Shut

An enormous amount of work from a brilliant team has gone into this - do check it out!

I wrote about things to consider when moving from AAA to indie dev - open.substack.com/pub/modecoll...

RIP to Brian Wilson, who gave us many perfect albums but also the perfect interview

Please refrain from opening your game with a nine hour cutscene. All I desire is a meagre fragmentary crumb of gameplay, such that I might make a determination as to whether any further time investment is warranted. Please, the gameplay. Please.

If you want to understand the gamer mind, consider that there is a popular take out there that the number one top wishlisted game on Steam has "the worst marketing of all time"

Posted some thoughts on moving from AAA to indie - if you've done this I'd value your advice as I'm going to be writing a bigger post on it soon (Sorry for linkedin - that is just where this happened to happen - if you can't see it I'll post somewhere else) www.linkedin.com/posts/paul-k...

I wrote about being unreasonable when making games modecollapse.substack.com/p/unreasonable

Cat sleeping in designated cat place (ULTRA RARE)

Surprised they put this much violence in

Watching the ever-excellent @warlockracy.bsky.social talk about Tiberian Sun I remembered a level design maxim we figured out: If you make a novelty section or gadget level, just make it *short, silly and easy*. There is nothing worse than slogging through under-baked design.

Wrote about Tim Cain's exceptional YouTube channel which I think is one of the best game development resources out there, especially if you are involved with RPG's in any shape or form... modecollapse.substack.com/p/this-is-th...

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I went to a different place that is not my house for a while today, worked there, walked around a bit and then came home. Why has nobody thought of this before.

I genuinely believe we'll have a much better time in the next two decades if intelligent people who are critical of AI move their focus to regulatory and IP issues and away from chameleon arguments about capabilities

I think it's good to at least try to understand what's going on in each of these categories!

4 hours… Still keys available for review/content creators over the launch period

This was fabulous and I super recommend it. Following on from this I am hugely enjoying @suddenlyvince.bsky.social 's run of this at the Black Project Gaming actual play podcast. I don't get on with some actual play stuff totally but this is right up my street.

I really believe this is where we're headed with AI in the medium-term particularly in medicine. techcrunch.com/2025/05/14/r...

It lurks