Gamedev

Skin tone presets are a real design decision, not a config detail. The problem statement here is precise: emojis offer five shades, a makeup brand might offer fifty, and a character creator will often hand you all 16,777,216 RGB values and call it inclusivity. Toney Alexander wanted the middle ground — a bounded, simple region of RGB that plausibly covers real people, with code you can drop into a character creator or a procedural population generator. ...

A solo Android developer published thirteen years of Google Play Console exports — monthly installs, uninstalls and active devices for three apps — and laid them against one question. In October 2014, one of his games did 2,591,467 installs in a single month and peaked at 886,208 active devices. In June 2026 the same game had 499. The essay is about what changed in between, and the answer is not that the game got worse. ...

Daniel Collin’s slide deck makes one argument and spends 77 slides making it: in game code, the cost of a loop is mostly the cost of getting to the bytes, not the arithmetic. A main-memory read is roughly 600 cycles; a register is 1–2. Once you accept that ratio, layout stops being a style preference. The whole case rests on a single example. An object-oriented Bot class computes m_aimDirection = dot3(m_position, target) * m_mod;. Run that across four bots and the deck tallies: ...

Darko Tomic is a Unity developer of about 11 years, and the essay starts with the feed rather than the figures: LinkedIn is now mostly “Open To Work” rings, including friends with a decade of experience. His argument is that treating the contraction as a single AI event misses what it actually is — the tail of a bubble, priced in years, with AI compressing the headcount that survived it. ...

Steven Gann started 27 Survivors on March 26th and tagged v1.0 the morning OpenSauce opened on July 17th. In between: 831 commits, 285 GDScript files, about 63,000 lines of code, one engine version bump, and two decks of the ship deleted six days before the show. He was laid off from Meta, and the game is where that went. The design rules are the ones he’d defend to the end: you cannot kill the antagonist, and the counter only ever goes down. You die, you continue as the next person on the manifest, the body stays where it fell with the loot still on it. Three loops run at once, and the friction between them is the game: ...

Screen-space ambient occlusion is in love with itself. Sean Barrett’s essay opens with the symptoms: amateur screenshots where convex corners get brighter near the corner, shipped games with halos and artifacts, and rooms whose corners are “weirdly dark” even when the effect is technically clean. He blames a belief — that real corners are dark — that let people write code producing unrealistic results. He attributes the failure to some combination of four factors: ...

A 3D artist working on the indie game Ashenmoor posted a walkthrough of a single character — a golem — from hand-drawn concept to a rigged, animated character running in Godot. He studied 3D for five years and has been working in the field since 2017. The AI sits in the middle of the pipeline, not at either end. The loop, in his order: Painted a quick concept sketch by hand in Krita Refined that image with AI (Krita AI Diffusion, plus a Krita-to-fal.ai add-on he built himself) Made a few manual touch-ups on the 2D image Generated the 3D model from that image with Hunyuan 3D 3.1 Rigged and animated it in Blender Brought it into Godot The part worth copying is the sequencing. Asked how he controlled the style, his answer was that he made sure the input image already looked right before handing it to the mesh generator — starting from his own sketch and refining it, rather than generating a concept and hoping the 3D step preserves it. Style control is an input problem, not a model problem. ...

Filipe Dilly’s design essay on Next Jump starts from the thing that makes shmups hard: reading enemy positions and shot patterns fast enough to pick a route through them. Next Jump moves that problem into turn-based play, which means the player gets unlimited time to observe — and the movement rules have to carry the tension alone. “If the movement mechanics doesn’t work, nothing else does.” Rather than invent something clever, he went back to checkers and chess: ...

A widely-upvoted post in r/aigamedev names the reason so many AI-assisted games read as AI at a glance. It is not the models. It is that most people are still making games “with a cup of coffee, a handful of prompts, and a folder full of working tiktok skills” — something breaks, so they prompt again, and keep prompting until it works. The argument is that this loop has no director in it, and a game without a director has nothing in it that could only have come from one: ...

The prologue demo for 1666: Amsterdam shipped with generative AI assets. The accusations turned out to be true, Panache apologised, and the studio promised to strip AI out before the game was playable. It is now in Early Access with the assets gone — and Patrice Désilets, the Assassin’s Creed creator behind it, says the removal is permanent. What Désilets said at a preview event: The AI was used “mostly at the beginning, in conception and pre-production” “It’s been totally removed, and we won’t be using any AI anymore” He was “a bit [thrown]” by reports that took his earlier comments out of context The GamesRadar+ column takes the correction at face value and still isn’t satisfied: ...

CD Projekt was asked on its latest earnings call how it uses AI in development. Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski gave the answer most large studios now give — and the load-bearing word in it is “predominantly.” The statement, as delivered: “AI is definitely becoming a thing in the games development as well” The studio is “still predominantly using people,” and that is the plan AI is “a tool like many others,” helping in places that may become more helpful later But CDPR is “not planning to rely on AI making complete games” The r/gamedev thread’s reaction, where the substance is: ...

A CS student with no game-dev experience asked r/gameai whether it’s realistic to specialise in game AI — NPC behaviour, planning, emergent gameplay, RL, multi-agent systems — without learning to build games. The answers from working devs were consistent, and not what the question assumed. The problem isn’t that the specialisation is uncommon. It’s that game AI isn’t a separable module: It’s a thin layer of logic that touches nearly every other system in the game. Gameplay systems have to be built with AI hooks in mind — hooks the AI will use, and often abuse. You need the engine fundamentals: update loops, frames versus physics ticks, how animations integrate with behaviours, whether agents are physics-driven. Selecting a decision-making architecture (utility AI, behaviour trees, planners) is the easy part — the same behaviour can be produced by almost any of them. The actual work is the interaction layer: how does the NPC know the player is somewhere they shouldn’t be, or doing something they shouldn’t? The career answer was blunt too. Large studios do employ NPC and enemy AI specialists, but entry is portfolio-driven — solo prototypes, or finding people to collaborate with. One reply recommended starting with a couple of tutorials until a player character moves in a real engine, then building AI that reacts to that player in different ways. The questioner’s own resolution: build a minimal testbed of basic shapes plus player functionality, then drop different decision systems into it and compare. ...

A self-taught dev building a CRPG asked whether enemy brains should stay on utility scoring with hand-authored overrides, or go fully hand-authored to give each enemy more personality. The answer from a reply by someone who has spent a lot of professional time on game AI was the one nobody reaches for as a technical solution. Always fake it as much as possible. The target, in his words, is what wine fans call mouthfeel — the sensation of intelligence has to conform to player expectations, not to reality: ...

A game can disclose one AI-generated picture hanging on a wall, and a slice of the audience stops evaluating the game at all. That’s the argument in this r/aigamedev essay, which accepts transparency as reasonable and then asks whether Steam’s AI disclosure has become a scarlet letter — a label that pre-sorts a game into a stigmatized category before anyone judges the work. The case the post builds: “You should have paid a real artist” usually has a false premise — for most small teams the alternative was never hiring anyone, so that content simply wouldn’t exist, or the project would be out of scope Tooling has always lowered the labor floor: engines, asset stores, middleware, procedural generation, mocap libraries, photogrammetry Asset flips were judged on the result — a lazy one died on its own, but a good game built on bought assets got called a good game That distinction is collapsing: how much AI was used, what for, how much human work surrounds it, and whether the game is good all become secondary to the label My Winter Car is the case study — criticism over a few AI-generated pictures and radio content buried the conversation about the game itself, and only cooled because the developer had years of goodwill banked from My Summer Car Steam users are already asking for an “AI filter” that hides every game containing any AI content, regardless of scope Valve’s incentive: the content is disclosed and whatever backlash follows is the developer’s problem — so why was there never an “asset flip” disclosure? The comments push back from both directions: ...

The interesting part of this project isn’t the editor — it’s what runs inside it. The tool modifies tracks, AI, sprites and physics in the original Super Mario Kart and exports a ROM that plays on real SNES hardware, with the user supplying their own copy of the game so nothing is stored. Underneath sits a near 1:1 recreation of the game running natively in GDScript, with C++ helpers for the sound engine. ...

Vittorio Romeo likes C++20 coroutine syntax and argues it is a terrible fit for game development. The objection is not speed. It is that a suspended coroutine’s state lives in a compiler-managed frame you cannot inspect, so it cannot be serialized. That matters because a paused coroutine in a game is game data. “We are on phase 3 with 0.3 seconds of wait remaining” has to travel with the boss’s health and position through saves, quick-loads, replay, and network sync. The standard model treats that state as invisible scaffolding. ...

Sean Barrett wrote the core rendering technology for Thief: The Dark Project, and years later wrote down how it worked — Quake’s software renderer had been documented exhaustively by Michael Abrash, and Thief’s never was. The game shipped in 1998, purely software-rendered, and the same renderer, modified by others for hardware, went on to power System Shock 2 and Thief 2. The constraints forced different answers to the same problems Quake solved: ...

Nearly every 3D scene-generation system starts from an explicit visual intent — a text prompt, a reference image, a sketch. EchoForge starts from a spatial audio recording, on the premise that sound already carries a hidden scene description. Unlike text, audio also arrives with direction and time attached: something is louder on one side, moves, feels distant or enclosed. It was built by two ESGI master’s students, presented at SIGGRAPH 2026, and took first place in the ACM Student Research Competition’s undergraduate category. The pipeline: ...

Calin P wrote the hardware rasterizer for his own PS1 emulator, P-chan, before writing the PSX-style shader he uses in his game. So his complaint carries weight: most PlayStation-look tutorials are wrong about the hardware in at least one respect. The post walks what the GPU actually did and then bolts each quirk onto a single Godot 4 spatial shader. The corrections are specific, and each one changes what you would write: ...

Easel’s multiplayer architecture is predictive: to keep clients in sync it snapshots world state and rolls it back on misprediction. With an off-the-shelf physics engine that means restoring the entire world every frame, which is what kept large worlds — an Among Us-sized spaceship of walls, panels and vents — out of reach for the engine. The new physics engine snapshots and rolls back only the parts of the world that change: ...