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-...

Should I give her a half cup of soft butter? (She really wants it)

It never stops feeling cool seeing my game get mentioned on Spacedock. You're going to love the Mercator class in the campaign too, Hooj.

After working myself to near-death for the entire month of January to get my singleplayer campaign code feature complete, I can now focus on the fun stuff: art, lighting, shaders, and story. Just kidding, now I have to switch back to main branch and deal with multiplayer balance. 🙃

I feel genuinely awful for the Highguard devs. They wouldn't be the hate du jour if someone *else* hadn't overhyped their game *for* them. Especially maddening to see other game devs join in, who know exactly how many years of peoples' lives are being dragged right now. Why are we eating our own?

I really loved the Trans rep in The Pitt S1. It's such a simple, mundane, blink-and-miss-it slice of what we deal with every day. The fact that the doctor, with everything else going on in the ER that day, cared enough to find the time to fix her records without being asked was really heartwarming.

I just spent 14 straight hours merging two branches that have been steadily accumulating overlapping changes in 1,600 files for almost a year. Protip: don't let your feature branch stay isolated for that long. Now the fun part of slowly uncovering all the things the merge broke begins... #gamedev

You know it was annoying problem when it results in a method that is 50% comments by volume. #gamedev

Unity Addressables is really neat but wow whoever designed it seems to really hate modders and anyone who tries to make their game moddable.

Code review. She doesn't look too impressed...

I have finally fixed a longstanding physics bug, "the clonk", where missiles would hit ships and do no damage. The cause was the result of multiple parts of the damage and physics systems all aligning in the worst way which made is extremely difficult to reproduce and thus fix. So, the details:

*Pushes PTB patch and closes main branch Unity project* "Ok, I'm done working on NYE, time to relax ... ... ... Actually just one more thing..." *Opens campaign branch Unity project*

With the proliferation of AI tools, and the permission structure being manufactured by prominent studio leads, our industry's mythologization of the "solo dev" is going to result in lots of budding game devs flocking to these tools because they want the title so bad, and being permanently stunted.

💜Fav pic of 2025💜

Nearly 8 months of work for a single pot of my mom's tomato sauce (a winter tradition in my family) and damn was it worth it. The depth of flavor was incredible. After dinner was over we had 4 large jars saved as well, plus all the meatballs and sausage we pulled out, so a few more meals ahead.

I made a video: youtu.be/05rc5j9QxAA #gamedev

It's honestly a miracle I can get any game dev work done at all under these conditions. This happens constantly. I took this picture yesterday and she's currently standing in front of my monitor in this exact same pose right now.

I saw a bunch of game awards "my vote cards" in the game dev feed and immediately wondered where indie devs find the time to actually *play* games, and then I realized this is actually indicative of the fact that I have very poor work/life balance.

Give this thread a read. It's a great synopsis of how the speculation- and finance-driven approach to managing game development has gutted the industry. Everyone who actually has their hands in the mud of making games knows this in their bones, but I rarely see it put into words so cleanly.

Well, I successfully got the enemy AI to stop focusing on the flagship. Caught some rockets in the process...

Gazing into the abyss of my AI mission prioritization system. I started my day trying to diagnose a strange behavior with the enemy AI and instead ended up making this AI state viewer. #gamedev

No one ever tells you how much math there is in gamedev. I just spent *all day* figuring out the correct formulas to remap the UVs for the socket's damage mask to the individual modules of the scalable VLS launchers. At least it finally works. Just ignore that we haven't made new textures yet.

Still in there, 5 years later. Still don't really know why...

Time for some more #gamedev #techart: Damage effects from the hull being mapped onto the turrets! Using the alternate UV map hack we came up with for the engine damage decals we can now make damage appear on components mounted on the hull as long as their material has the correct properties.

Never a good day when I have to open regedit to debug a crash... #gamedev

After a whole season of harvesting and freezing tomatoes from our garden, it's finally time to make and jar some sauce. This pot is like 15 or 18 quarts and it barely fit half of them.

The updated ship models and new damage shaders allow for damage effects on the large engine bells and maneuvering thrusters. The way we did this without adding additional colliders for them is actually a pretty funny hack. #gamedev #techart

I'm not a communications expert but "Unity Platform Protection" sounds like you're trying to push a branded security product on me and not a notification of a *critical security vulnerability*. Maybe lead with that next time. #unity #unity3d

Somehow ended up with Gold Vauxhall. Gotta say this is a first time error for me... #gamedev

Something funny we learned working on this graphical update for Neb is that apparently there are two models for the Vauxhall light cruiser. One is 10% larger than the other and at first we weren't sure which one was actually currently in the game. #gamedev

More #gamedev tools for our singleplayer campaign: In order to balance the ammo economy, one must understand the ammo economy. We're about to start testing the third (of four) zones in the campaign, and testers were reporting how they were starting the feel the resource strain by the end of zone 2.

There's nothing quite like wasting an hour debugging a simple issue to make you spend the rest of your evening (and the next morning) making an in-game visual debugging viewer for your homebrew campaign scripting system so you can see the values being passed around in real time. #gamedev

Hmmmmmm...forgot to add 1 to my offset index #gamedev

Last night was my real playthrough of the first 8 missions of my campaign, and despite knowing everything that was going to happen and constantly stopping to fix bugs I actually enjoyed playing my own game for the first time in years. It helped me remember why I got into #gamedev in the first place.

Just another day in #gamedev 🫠

Maybe we should plant less cucumbers next season...

hl2_clipping_sound.wav #gamedev #indiedev

Another thing that was always really ugly and can now be fixed: mount components no longer have to look pristine even when the armor around them is totally destroyed. #gamedev #indiedev #techart

I made this account to post #gamedev / #indiedev stuff that's too technical for most of my players to care about, so to start off let's do some #techart: How I did better damage decal mapping!