Without strong public transit, mobility doesn't work for anyone. Join me this morning at 10a at the Ferry Bldg to kick off signature gathering for Connect Bay Area. We need your help to win luma.com/le1g7slf?tk=...

Added reload UI sugar. When you run out of ammo in your weapon, there's a visual marker that trails your cursor. When you reload, there's a notice next to your character.

Found this old GIF of a sneaking-focused roguelike prototype. Interesting sense of scale to it. I really like how vision looks walking through doors or peering through a door at long-distance.

Playing @drewwww.bsky.social's RECLAIMER. I would appear to be in danger.

I've started reading these to my kid, and it's a delight to return to Tolkien as an adult. When I read them as a teen, I was trying to suck the plot out of them as a pure adventure story. But there's so much here to chew on that I missed.

First steps on a little tutorial system. I always put this off and regret it. I'm going to try to make something that onboards players and gives them some contrived scenarios to see if it's fun.

🍄 happy new year ✨ may the ritual nourish you

@lazerwalker.com ran into this and I recall you being curious about next gen go clients. Haven't spent much time with it but it seems on the path towards that destination: github.com/kaya-go/kaya

Made a little guy that turns if its path gets blocked.

Thinking about how to communicate as much as possible in a compact space. I want players to know (1) how much damage an attack will do, (2) how an enemy will be moved by the attack, (3) how much health an enemy has, and (4) if an attack will be lethal or not. This animated bar is my current idea.

Worked up a new "intent" system, where NPCs can target a spot a turn in advance and then fire the next turn. I'm inspired here by tactics games that "show the barrel of the gun" like "Slay the Spire" or "Into the Breach." The NPC has a laser weapon with two shots in it, then it needs to reload.

Beyond research, craft ITSELF drives huge amounts of human effort. It is a mistake to think that people make things only to have them and would welcome a way to skip the making itself. Doing the work is not a "cost."

The npc bot (orange) can lock on to a player it sees nearby and declare its intent to shoot next turn. Anything in the red line will take damage, even if it's not the intended target.

This is another way of saying what @jamellebouie.net was saying earlier this week. The text-based platforms are marginal among teens, and video-based platforms are dominant.

I'm curious about this too. I see a few contributing dynamics: - Attribution in software engineering is rare - Open source culture - High average pay, low sense of precarity - Disconnection between "how" (messy LLM-internals) and "what" (the product); resulting UI has less of an LLM-smell.

Playing with a bouncing grenade-type effect. It's a bit awkward at this grid size. You can get a lot of situations where it's hard to produce an intuitive result. The preview graphics help, but aren't a total solution. Not sure if this is stable enough to use in a real game, but I'm glad I tried.

Step out of the way and push the rocket towards another target.

Rockets that fly towards the player and then explode. Not smart; once they spawn they cannot change direction.

My 2012 dissertation is, basically, 171 pages about why not to do this and what to do instead.

ian bogost getting the timeline riled up by ludocentrism posting….. i will sleep soundly in my bed tonight because obama is president and idle thumbs still puts out episodes weekly and i’ve got uni in the morning for it is 2015

Thinking about more complex NPC behaviors. Learned behavior trees this week and made two bots: a leader that picks random waypoints in the world and paths there, and another that follows the nearest leader. Think "squads" of different bot types, eventually.

Me, yesterday: Making doors in a 2d turn based game can't be hard, right? I know people say doors are hard, but surely not in this context. Me, today: Okay, first the doors will auto-discover each other and THEN each turn check if there's a quorum for a decision about opening or closing...

This rings true to me. The massive user numbers on consumer LLMS mean SOMETHING. We have to be curious about what value people are getting and why they keep coming back week on week.

Playing with diffusion systems. Spawning in a bunch of Smoke entities that slowly spread out and then fade. When it's a harder white, you can't see through. But as it dissipates it turns grey and becomes transparent to the FOV system.

I'm such a big Prism fan. All the fundamentals for a roguelike or other turn-based, grid-based game just WORK -- tiles, rendering, animation, LOS, inventory, scheduling, world generation. Even if you haven't used Lua before, I highly recommend it! github.com/PrismRL/prism

Shrinking Circles: Declining Max Squad Size in Multiplayer Video Games as an Indicator of Rising Social Isolation

NEW COLORS!!

the thing about asking for a worker owned anything on the web is that the pitch has to account for the fact that the website is going to - innately - be slower to add features, slower to respond to issues, have financial struggles, etc

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...