At new parent class they taught us "No good babies, just unobservant babies. It makes sense to cry, what they're going through." I think about that a lot these days.

what are we doing here folks

RECLAIMER a tactical roguelike drewww.itch.io/reclaimer Use your dash to pause time and establish the perfect attack, pushing enemies into walls to conserve ammo. Escape with as much loot as you can! @roguetemple.bsky.social #14drl #gamedev

RECLAIMER — gameplay and tactics guide www.youtube.com/watch?v=A19R... There are some cool spatial mechanics at work in RECLAIMER that can really improve your efficiency and boost your score.

I have a weird love for UI elements like this, where it implies an exhaustive list of kinds of things you might want to do, but it's only two things. Anything, and a very specific thing. Then I wonder ... what else was on the team's list before they stopped working on the product entirely?

RECLAIMER a tactical roguelike drewww.itch.io/reclaimer Use your dash to pause time and establish the perfect attack, pushing enemies into walls to conserve ammo. Escape with as much loot as you can! @roguetemple.bsky.social #14drl #gamedev

I've got a playable build of my #14drl game available here if anyone wants to give it a go and share some feedback! drewww.itch.io/reclaimer #gamedev

Changing a ton of stuff at once and it's ... kinda working. Level gen is a mess. There ARE little moments that now start to feel fun / interesting / game-y. But the systems are also pretty baroque and I'm not sure how intelligible I can make it in time for the end of the jam. #14drl #gamedev

Combat starting to feel like something here. I think maybe bots need to have more time between shots but it does feel like something. Main weirdness is that weapon switching takes a turn right now which makes it hard to set up perfect shots. May make it instant. #gamedev #14drl

Added a ton of weapon juice. Animations, UI notifications when you are empty, when you reload, push animations, damage indicators, the works!

This action is looking to be vital to drive pressure. Monday's at 9am are hard, but if you can be there, please do. Spread the word to other who might be interested.

Making good progress on AOE weapons. This is demonstrating that it properly highlights cells that will be hit by the attack, respecting LOS from the target space. #14drl

Made some progress on new weapon types. Targeting highlighting for lasers and shotguns. #14drl

V1 world generation is in, a simple block-based prefab approach. Modeling an encounter design idea. You start opening the chest and it takes some turns to unlock, and it activates nearby enemies. #14drl

I am so so so proud to have been part of this effort. Climate change is already a major threat to human life, health, and thriving. It is important that we get the most accurate science on the record to delineate that threat, so we can build a better future. www.npr.org/2025/09/02/n...

Day 1 #14drl is done. Here's basic gameplay at this point. You can move around and click on enemies to shoot them. You can swap weapons with number keys. It takes a turn, though, so don't let enemies get too close before you switch to your knife. Oh, and watch your ammo and reload when you can!

Kicking off a game jam today! I'm taking part in the #14drl event. It's a 14 day game jam, focused on "traditional" roguelikes. itch.io/jam/roguetem... Staying "traditional" means combat, items, and progression -- elements I haven't explored in past games. Stay tuned! Or mute!

It's getting harder and harder to deny that AGI is a near certainty. This kind of rapid expansion, this level of investment and infrastructural shift, this amount of *risk* - it doesn't happen without astronomical reward. The other day I saw a big barn, which can only mean one thing: giant horses

Roguetemple's Fortnight Jam (14DRL, itch.io/jam/roguetem...) starts in 10 days. Dedicated to the classic roguelike experience, as 7DRL in spring increasingly explores broader 'system game' interpretations of the term 'roguelike'.

I'm prepping for #14drl #roguelike game jam starting in ~10 days. I think I've got the outlines of a game design. Here's my (mostly incomprehensible beyond page 1) pre-jam design thinking: docs.google.com/document/d/1... Hit me up if any of this strikes a chord for you, for better or worse!

@polyducks.co.uk I've been using your rexpaint adapted sprite sheets for MRMOTEXT and it's been great! I wonder if you happened to have a v1.1 version lying around?

I've been struck by how a-historical the predictions about "AI" adoption have been when compared with new capabilities in the past. Are we really two years away from "AI" spreading so widely in industries that it measurably improves outcomes and cuts jobs? medium.com/@drewwww/spe...

TikTok creators learned to evade this years ago -- time for the terms to mutate. You don't say murder you say "unalive."

Major respect for this attitude. We need to be curious about what this era is like for people. That doesn't mean being un-critical, that doesn't mean compromising our values.

drewww.itch.io/scavenger a prototype of a non-combat exploration rogue-like game. It's quite simple, but it's perhaps the foundation for something bigger? Not sure. Curious about any feedback or ideas you have for it! #picotron #gamedev #roguelike

drewww.itch.io/scavenger a prototype of a non-combat exploration rogue-like game. It's quite simple, but it's perhaps the foundation for something bigger? Not sure. Curious about any feedback or ideas you have for it! #picotron #gamedev #roguelike

LLM-based experiences are also uniquely hard to reason about. We can imagine the best case scenarios easily and sometimes they do demo like that. But probabilistic experiences break a part of our brain and intuition fails us. He could well have seen a demo video where it worked great.

had an inspiration for a title screen and here we are! #picotron

This instinct is a big part of what gets sanded down with LLM code generation. The impedance to make things is highly unpredictable, and typically feels easier than it actually will be. It is a tool without obvious material constraint. It is stochasticity incarnate.

Hacking on the #picotron synth for the first time to try to make some game sounds. twitch.tv/dr_ewww

I've got a weird stalling problem where players can easily run out of energy but also not die. Current concept -- press and hold "F" to sacrifice a unit of health to get a small energy recharge. Still possible to stall at 1 health and no path to an exit/chip and no energy. But a lot less likely.

destroy the internet

Cantata is filled with creative novelty. There are parts of it that are consequently not the most "smooth," but I promise you will come away from any time spent with it thinking "huh, I've never seen THAT before" about many aspects. I expect we'll look back on it as a portent in various ways.

Trying out a new damage effect where the screen flickers when you take damage. Increasing amounts of flicker as total damage taken increases.

The rise of algorithmic feeds is a real problem for Twitch. Users learned fast that a "live now" tweet was unlikely to be accurate once timelines were surfacing the "best" tweets from a model versus pure reverse-chronological. Good news for creators!

Part of making movement consequential has to be a good clock. I'm trying a periodically-spawning enemy type. Here's where they spawn. A spawner flashes if it's the source of the next spawn. If you're near an EMP bot, it will blast an EMP that drains your energy. #picotron #gamedev #roguelike

Full game loop! Collect chips, return to the exit. Try to make it five levels and see how many total chips you can collect without dying. www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/cart_inf... WASD/Arrows. Bump walls to "dig" (costs energy) Refill energy with blue balls. Return to exit with at least 1 chip to leave.

Full game loop! Collect chips, return to the exit. Try to make it five levels and see how many total chips you can collect without dying. www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/cart_inf... WASD/Arrows. Bump walls to "dig" (costs energy) Refill energy with blue balls. Return to exit with at least 1 chip to leave.

Plugged the basic world generator back into core game. Starting to feel like something. Next up, food clock. Busting walls needs to cost energy. And then some way to recharge in the environment. Random energy orbs to start. After that, some downsides to exploring -- bring back enemies.

Skin Deep is such a delight. But there are two issues I'm feeling a little held back by. First, the pirate boarding party. I love-love-love that it's a reason to have to "go loud." This is such smart design to force you to use the full range of combat systems.

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Playing with some simple world gen. Placing "rooms" relatively randomly, each room gets a "door" with a pathway that extends orthogonally out. Since you can dig through walls, it's not fatal that not all rooms connect.

This is in part a consequence of early access and live service cultures. Games are not complete boxed items, they are perpetually becoming something new. Games are better when your friends play them. Games are an identity.

🎉 Skin Deep is RELEASED! 🎉 👉 Steam store.steampowered.com/app/301280/S... 👉 Epic Games Store store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/skin... This game was made with a crew of wonderful folks: blendogames.com/skindeep/cre... We hope you enjoy Skin Deep! ✨

I mean, isn't this the most reliable publishing strategy of the last 25 years? Identify a niche game with rough edges and pour polish on it to make it mainstream. Everquest -> WoW CS 1.6 -> CS:GO -> Valorant Day Z -> PUBG -> Fortnite Dota -> League / Dota 2 Dota AutoChess -> TFT Tarkov -> ???

This is an example of what I meant yesterday. These are reasons why a certain outcome is USEFUL. But it says "reasons." So a certain reaction is "well, that's not what they say is the reason." Or "in some other domain they acted in a way that suggests a different goal." It's not inconsistent!

There's a rhetorical loop On Here where someone says "[billionaires/politicians] do X because of Y" and people argue against it presuming the claim to be about their INTERNAL rationale.

My #7DRL #roguelike entry this year has you playing as an 18th century artist who must race against the clock to destroy their own art before it destroys them. It's inspired by the board game #spiritisland, which I have been playing a lot of lately. rentonl.itch.io/penelo

If this is going to be an exploration game in a fallen/decayed environment, I thought "digging" might be fun. Trying: - Tap a wall once to "break" it and get vision to what's beyond. - Tap again to make it passable. Probably will add an energy system so this isn't an unrestricted ability.