It’s the simplest thing in the world with a stainless pan. Bring up the heat, add in some oil, wait for it to smoke, wipe it out with a cloth, in with cold oil, add in your food. It won’t stick.

My wife every single night. Poor thing can’t wait until morning.

It’s a little surprising that 2D and 3D are such different skillsets for game dev, since I’ve seen so much indie 2D and 3D animation being done in blender in the past few years. It’s not something I know much about in practical terms though, I’m not in the industry and I don’t know the practical tools or workflows at all. The one thing I do know is that the number of A’s there are in a conversation about game developers is roughly equal to how loud one feels like screaming.

I do worry that Steam is getting too big for its britches though, and I’m trying to spend more money on places like GOG or Itch.io. The one good thing about there being such an unremitting storm of content these days is that you can easily decide to spend the majority of your time away from the more commercially driven stuff.

Thanks for taking my wall of text as it was intended, mainly just carving out a space for a few of my hobbyhorses and trying to be slightly self-aware about it for once. I knew I was laying down a lot of railroad track and I hope nobody thinks I’m demanding to be taken seriously. Usually the username does the trick there.

I confess I don’t read enough interviews with game industry people to know where their heads are at with regard to most things. The prevailing trends they chase and talk about are very commercial in nature, and it just leaves me cold to talk about which creative choices they think will make the most money - if you have a source for more substantive interviews I’m all ears.

I do like that there are “ugly” games (low-poly, or at least less grounded in realism) that are proving that there’s money in prioritizing other aspects of the creative - but I worry that they’ll just learn the wrong lessons. I read last night that Monopoly Go! has so far spent over a billion USD on advertising alone. I am still reeling from that fact, and I don’t have a context to make sense of it. I haven’t even played that game, nor do I recall having seen ads for it. A billion doesn’t go as far as it used to, I guess.

You’re right that it’s not necessarily a cycle, any more than tectonic plate migration is a cycle. It’s too large and slow to really say how it’ll turn out. I think if we zoom out really far, it might be the case that there aren’t as many universally cherished cultural touchstones as there used to be, substantive culture feels like it’s becoming more diffuse and niche as time goes on. Even a dear friend of over two decades with largely the same tastes can talk for ages without mentioning anything I’ve ever heard of. There’s so much, everyone’s bound up in a personal little tornado of content. I guess I’m on a natural phenomena metaphor kick.

I have high hopes for the future of 2D design in games. You can work your ass off on 2D and 3D and make either look good, but the work really shows more with 2D - an example like Sea of Stars spring to mind, with their highly dialed-in Chrono Trigger looks with anime cut scenes. The tools continue to change, but you can always spot when hard work wasn’t done.

After how he’s carried on, I don’t care about strategic voting anymore. It’s greens all the way for me.

I’m going to be annoying for a second, but I promise to try and make it worth it: It isn’t about purism or even “fun”, because not all art is meant to amuse. Art is allowed to be anything, and we should treat critique of art (including games) an an exploration of what the creator was trying to do, to what extent they succeeded and how, what it makes you think of, and possible meanings. Play is merely one aspect of a game’s artistic content.

The entire subject of fun in terms of game design is, artistically speaking so nascent that there is hardly any history to that field of study. We’ve been making up for lost time in recent decades, but the entire concept of game theory is not even a century old.

So, that was probably annoying of me. But the point I’m here to make is that “fun vs graphics” isn’t really the conversation we’re trying to have.

One conversation we should have is the problem that exists with how games are funded and how those financial incentives can shape the creative side in a way that might hinder what’s being done with the medium. Games aren’t just art, they’re big business, and the conversation is taking place within the context of the tech industry, geopolitical trends, and even monetary policy. Now that the industry is so large, it often feels like creators working with big budgets are becoming risk-averse and often greedy. When traditional artists seem overly risk-averse and driven by financial incentives, the art world turns on them in a big way. Look at Anish Kapoor and vantablack.

Another conversation to have is graphics in gaming within the larger computing industry. We’re at the tail end of Moore’s law and the GPU market seems like it’s starting to turn away from gaming towards other perceived cash cows like LLMs and generative AI. So we should not expect graphics cards to continually get better forever, or even cheaper honestly. It’s been the case for decades, but the situation is dynamic.

For a long time, it seems like there has been a bad combination of forces at play in gaming: the promise of endlessly increasing computing power, and lurching shifts in monetary policy that lead initially to massive tech speculation and then periods of focusing intensely on profitability.

I think it’s reasonable to predict that we’re going to see smaller development budgets in gaming, increased focus on well-optimized code, a shift away from the emphasis on realism in games, or a general collapse in the “big budget” gaming industry as some or all of these fail to materialize.

Meanwhile, indie gaming has been on a hit streak. That food chain has been thriving at lower trophic levels, and no wonder. They’re taking more risks, being more generous, and reaching less highly than their larger peers. It’s a winning formula under tight monetary policy and the overall larger context.

I’ve said far too much, sorry to drop this on you.

Hear me out: two different sizes

I once did this during an end of term Spanish competition. I was a D student all term long, but at the end of it one girl jokingly proposed. I was a rock star.

Been chasing that dragon for the last two decades.

Could have sworn I didn’t vote Tory. Fucking bugger

The US is, what, 40% farmland and another 13% wilderness. Add to that the 13th amendment and the most imprisoned populace per capita?

The US is absolutely an agrarian slave economy.

Remember when they used to at least pretend to let us pick?

It doesn’t matter, you send multiple body doubles who are playing coy and could actually be the real one. Schroedinger’s autocrat.

A ritual excommunication? I wish we had a transcript. Were you abjured?

Cosigners of genocide.

If you’re a lawyer, people usually think you’re a cunt. They’re usually right.

Real sus to casually pretend not to know what feet are when you want em that bad. Arielle was a freak

Connect with local resistance

That’s n-

You know yeah okay yes, good point

We are outnumbered, as usual.

A 30cm offset serrated bread knife? At least the base is vaguely flared.

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