Ben Britten

Ben Britten

@benbritten.bsky.social

Previously worked on many, many games; gamedev for nearly 20 years. I am old. I post random 3d printing stuff and sometimes bunnies. He/Him. Australia. Also birds apparently. (All projects/code/art/games I post are human made, genAI is garbage.)

1.2K followers2.4K following899 posts

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

well, crap. I had been eyeing @proton.me as a replacement for google to get away from the AI crap. I guess it is good I had not made that jump yet. Where are people going for email these days that is not ensloppified?

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Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

getting around to enemies again fo rmy #godot thingy. Started super basic so I can get the aggro working right. First I do a radius check and anyone outside the radius is ignored, inside the radius I do a line of sight from the enemy to the player, and as soon as it sees the player, it wakes up.

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

once an enemy sees you, it then A* paths to your position, and at the moment it will follow you to the ends of the earth, slowly. You can see the paths in this vid in yellow, a bit flickery because those debugs are on the physics thread.

Ben Britten reposted

Jennifer/Aster Unkle 🏳️‍⚧️
@spookycutewitch.bsky.social

“AI is here to stay, and there’s nothing you can do about it 😏” “…” “Wait, why are you doing something about it? I told you there was nothing- stop it Stop It STOP IT!!! THIS ISN’T FAIR! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO LET ME DO IT!!!! I’M TELLING TEACHER!!!!!!!!!!”

Kim Hu@kim-hu.com

I can't believe he's still at it, it's been days

Ben Britten reposted

Casey S. Pumpkins 🎃
@caseyexplosion.bsky.social

It always comes back to this for me; if AI was so good, such a disclosure would be a selling point. If AI was everything these slop jockeys said it was, they should be proud to let people know their game was AI made. But the proof is in the pudding, and they can't stand that people don't want it.

Kim Hu@kim-hu.com

I can't believe he's still at it, it's been days

Ben Britten reposted

Yarn Spinner Tool
@yarnspinner.dev

It's a rough time to be an indie dev, so we got to thinking what we could do about it... Announcing MATES' RATES 🍻 We're offering 12 month-long co-dev engagements where we work on whatever you need to succeed! Very permissive terms. Flat rate of US$5,000ea (+ taxes). 🎟️ yarnspinner.dev/mates-rates

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

I talked with heaps of fellow gamedevs at Melbourne games week in early Oct, and it was more surprising to find one that _was_ using AI for code. Most had tried it, to be sure. but they all came to the same conclusion: it's shit, and you get better results faster and cheaper by doing it yourself.

Mega Knockdown@megaknockdown.com

RT if you don't use AI for coding

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

I will fully admit, that the number of devs who were using it and were singing its praises was much higher than I had thought, but this is maybe 30%. lots of people in AA/AAA and triple I sort of studios who were under pressure to use it, but that is a different story.

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

more work on my 'lets learn #godot by making some wacky shit' prototype. I have spent probably too much time making the wall lighting 'smooth'. With line of sight type algos it can get a bit flickery as you go around walls, and is especially bad in twisty cooridors. (see the first half of the vid)..

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

I added a lerp to the glow values so they are smoother. I have it cranked up pretty high for these vids so it is really clear, but I will pull it back to a nice compromise between 'ghost walls' and 'flicker' This vid has new hotness at the start and end, with the old way in the middle for contrast.

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

my heart goes out to all my friends who are legit trying to run a game studio building games on Unreal and watching the company that owns the engine turn to shitslop in real time. As an ex-Unity dev, I feel yah.

Cale Michael@xjustified.bsky.social

This shit just writes itself at this point. Just the name "Epic AI MegaJam" is a joke that best describes what is going on with these companies.

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

Finally!! I have been seeing everyone else post about getting their copies of @continuemag.bsky.social and the anticipation has been debilitating. Finally got mine when I checked the mailbox just now. its amazing, looks great, everything about it is rad. Get yourself a copy if you can!

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

lol. lmao. (but also: ffs; this is bleak)

KetAnthropic JoshAI@ketanjoshi.co

The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead: www.ispot.tv/ad/SoDi/micr...

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

So? We are what? Six or twelve months into every single enterprise and web engineer producing at a minimum of 10x; more like 100x if most of them are to be believed. But somehow not a single piece of software has gotten any better? Most has gotten worse. Where is all this productivity going then?

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

doin some more work on the #godot prototype thingo: today: pathfinding. This will ultimately be for the baddies, but I am just driving the player around to get the algo right. So this is just randomly picking a point in the dungeon, pathfinding, go there, repeat..

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

This is just basic A*, super simple. I have implemented A* a handful of times in my career, its a pretty simple algo and I think everyone should do it once at least! I discovered (after I was done) that #godot has A* built in 😅 I will test em and see which one is more efficient. (probably godot)

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

the thing is: the code, at a fundamental level _is_ the game. It is the bristles of the brush, the paint on the palette, the canvas, the wood of the frame, the wall you hang the painting on, etc. Obv games are not just code, but the code is what you are using to express the visuals, sounds, design..

adamatomic@adamatomic.bsky.social

"dont worry, we didn't use LLMs for real art, like writing, or graphics, or sound, we only used it for dumb gross useless basic shit like programming" always the funnest thing to read as a programmer, as someone whose whole career is based on code, whose handwritten library changed the industry etc

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

code can be shithouse and your game can still be good. In fact I might argue that some games' really bad code is why they're good. the jank is personality, its uniqueness. So, just like art, sound, VO, etc, if you want your game to be mid, then go ahead and use genAI code. (don't actually; its shit)

Ben Britten reposted

Eniko Fox
@enikofox.com

If you dislike AI please stop saying AI can code now. Just because it can generate code that works for some loose definition of the word works doesn't mean it can code because coding is so much more than that. Please, I'm begging you, you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to them

Ben Britten reposted

Kenney
@kenney.nl

Don't let billionaires convince you slop is the future. They're used to managing & directing, not making things themselves. Of course they can't see the difference. They don't understand your love for the craft. Keep making personal, beautiful games. You've got my support 💖

Ben Britten reposted

John Scalzi
@scalzi.com

I see we're having a debate about whether it's okay to go back to "X," the site owned by a trillionaire fascist who is currently bankrolling the GOP's midterm, throttled Ukraine's war effort, and still winkingly allows vast amounts of CSAM on his service Answer: No, what the fuck is wrong with you

Ben Britten reposted

Richard Meredith
@rtm223.me

Given that the person who had their game "replicated" is also an AI slopper, is lying about that, and the "replica" was on Steam before their game was: I feel ok using this as a jumping off point for discussing why I don't think this is anywhere near as much of an issue as people are worried about

Sos "Buy Lazy Kickers" Sosowski@sosowski.bsky.social

How do you even survive as an indie in the current landscape? This is insane.

Ben Britten reposted

ari velazquez 🌯
@ari.velazquez.fyi

if gamedev as a microblogging community moves back to twitter, i will no longer be part of the gamedev microblogging community lmao

Kayin@kayin.moe

When bluesky dies, assuming atproto doesn't survive on its own (which it might but probably not), we're going going to "Make excuses to not use mastodon again awhile also just going back to twitter despite how much worse that is", right? We're not gonna do this AGAIN, right?

Ben Britten reposted

AUTOMATON WEST
@automatonwest.bsky.social

Konami president Hayakawa believes AI “won’t bring a significant change” to the game market. “Humans” and “creators” are crucial for developing innovative…

automaton-media.comKonami president Hayakawa believes AI “won’t bring a significant change” to the game market. “Humans” and “creators” are crucial for developing innovative gamesKonami Digital Entertainment president Hideki Hayakawa discussed AI's potential impact on the market in a recent company report.
Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

More boring indie gamedev: cuz everything costs too much, I spent some time scavenging various bits of old hardware. Managed to find a few old drives, an old mac mini, and got a cheap enclosure: now I have a RAID 10 NAS that will house our build artefacts and backups locally so I can cut my AWS use.

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

In the end it is 3 1TB drives and a 1.5TB drive that are RAID 10, so I am losing a bit of space on the 1.5 drive, but meh. This all gets attached to an old mac mini running ubuntu server, and just lives on the local network. Builds will distribute the artefacts here, backups get put here, etc.

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

tests confirm: it is very slow! 😬 this was expected tho, and it reads and writes faster than my measly gigabit local network can push bits, so it is fine. my transfers basically saturate at ~110MB/s which is about as fast as I can expect on these wires. So that is good!

Ben Britten reposted

Sophie
@sophies.games

Wrote a new thing for the first time in forever! This is a guide to making multiplayer games in Godot, though mostly focused on helping you understand how it all actually works. Hopefully you find it interesting/helpful! #gamedev #indiedev #godotengine sophies.games/blogs/b4352f...

Ben Britten reposted

Rami Ismail (رامي)
@ramiismail.com

Even in the year 2026, with so many potential entries, this is somehow the most pathetic thing I've seen all year.

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Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

had a bit of time for the prototype this week. Got some super exciting work done: added an in-game log view that mirrors what the #godot log output looks like. This is super boring but handy as i have also started to do proper builds and quick access to logs makes debugging a build much quicker.

Ben Britten
@benbritten.bsky.social

NFTs are online, and they're here to stay. blockchains are the layer that lasts, so excited to see human NFT interactions being prototyped on poob.dippy

Jay 🦋@jay.bsky.team

agents are online, and they’re here to stay. open protocols are the layer that lasts, so excited to see human agent interactions being prototyped on delve.town

delve.townDelvetown