James | CWS 🇨🇦

The Heat Retreat Steam store page is finally live and ready for wishlisting! Tell your friends, tell your dog, tell your cat, tell everyone! 🎉 store.steampowered.com/app/3375550/...

Another week, another #bevymergetrain :) Lots of careful explanation and thinking on this one; I *stopped* yesterday because I could feel my eyes glazing over. Making decisions and exercising judgement is the core of #opensource and #programming. Read about mine? gist.github.com/alice-i-ceci...

Mass Effect was my ultimate white whale, my all-time dream project. For the last couple years I'd been in discussion w/ BioWare & EA to take on the project & as part of that I wrote close to 20 minutes of music to explore where the franchise can go next, may as well share it!

I, for one, welcome our Microslopless future

Between Tim Sweeney being an absolute AI chud and the harassment of our beloved @kenney.nl, we've decided to cancel our previously announced Epic Games Store release for Shape Sender Deluxe 🚮

A cautionary tale: Today I spent half the day debugging & redesigning a system to track game state transitions; I did not spend enough time rolling around in my chair on the first version. Now I know better: the other half of the day was spent rolling around in the chair

Not the top Steam review of Dressmaker making me cry this morning!

Oh man, wish this was around *before* I rolled my own glyphs 😅 But...mine need to be pretty small to fit with Heat Retreat, so each symbol fits inside 8x8 px. Still, great to have as a reference at least - half the challenge making these was finding all the different button styles

I'm a little late to the wake for BioWare being closed but I absolutely loved their games. Neverwinter Nights was a favourite, and little known fact - they put out a Linux native build, which was super impressive for 2002 (included on the disks)

🥱 #Microsoft has announced “digital sovereignty”. Again. New fancy terms, same problem: a foreign government can still demand your data or cut off your services. The stack, licensing and rules stay under Microsoft’s control, not yours. That’s #SovereigntyWashing: 👉 nextcloud.com/blog/soverei...

You might have seen the original "no genAI seal" by @kanaratron.bsky.social. I've made the icon into a set of assets in both PNG and vector formats that can be more widely used in different contexts. You can find them here: www.joramwolters.com/no-gen-ai-ico/

Last I'll post about this, but Elon Musk disagrees with me. This means I am onto something, and I feel more valid in my opinion than ever.

The fear is real; I've scaled back my posts - especially artwork - drastically, plus put my blog on hold for now because of all the slop cloning. At least until I can reliably poison everything Plus it's really hard keeping up on socials as a solodev 😅

Ysabel Yates'... I mean Cookie Monster's superb takedown of why GenAI in the workplace sucks.

over the hill is out today on Steam! 🐻🌲 we self-published, self-funded this game and our 🤘badass🤘 team and partners worked so hard we are super proud of what we created and hope you will enjoy it!

100,000 weekly active Bazzite users! 💜 universal-blue.discourse.group/t/100k-pengu...

Bevy 0.20 is out now! It features Solari and DLSS improvements, better BSN syntax, BSN "ready" events, WESL is now Bevy's shader language, more UI widgets (color picker, scrollable list views, dropdowns), Sprite Materials, Extended 2D materials, Pan Orbit Camera, and more! bevy.org/news/bevy-0-...

Knowing where so many creative tools (Rive, Adobe, etc) have ended up with their AI adoption, I dread to think what the Game UI Database could have become in the hands of someone with no respect for the creative process. The GUIDB is proudly anti-AI and will always champion humans, no matter what!

Alright, kindergarten gradual entry is finally DONE for my youngest 🎉 I can finally focus on some gamedev without needing to drop what I'm doing to chauffeur kids to/from school/after school programs, and everyone starts school at the same time, no more offset start times

After years of company stalling, Blizzard workers win mega-contract that applies to all unionized teams aftermath.site/blizzard-union...

No Man's Sky Cosmos 📋Own A Space Station 🤝Alliances 🛰️Orbital Bases 📡Space Hulks 🚀Anniversary Expedition 🗺️Star Map 💎Deep-Space Looting 🪨Asteroid Belts 🦠Infested Outposts ☀️The Sun 🧙‍♀️Dev Commentary 🧲Tractor Beam ❄️Ice Fields 🪐Outposts ⛰️Improved Terrain 🔫Shipbreaking

We’re proud to announce that #Valheim 1.0 is out now! Gather your friends, sharpen your axes and check out the patch notes below. We’ll see you in the tenth realm! valheim.com/news/valheim...

Taking a break from the game's pixel art & working on some explorations to improve on my (crappy) capsule art. Plus enjoying the cooler end of summer weather 🏖

I'm in this picture and I don't like it 😆😅

Glad I'm already entirely off Google products entirely, but this is infuriating 😡 It is, and always will be, Lake Ontario

Lou's Lagoon has officially landed! 🛬🎉 Explore the vibrant Limbo archipelago now on Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 1|2! #IndieDev #GameDev #IndieGame

Tiny fire! This I found pretty challenging at only 8x8 px, kept finding it either too energetic or too static. But good enough for now, I'll probably adjust it more once I have it in the game properly

Oh come on @proton.me - silently enable auto categorizing emails and not show them in the main inbox anymore? Really? I have a ton of missed email now because I had no idea they were getting automatically "sorted" into categories, and badly too. Is nothing safe from enshittification 🤬

Multitasking game dev/hockey dad😅

Its seems to finally be official so ill say again, for real this time: You can jow buy South of Midnight without contributing to the genocide Isreal is committing with the help of Microsoft. Its a great game, everyone should play it. Hoping now to pick up a PS5 disk if they're still available.

Woah, woke up to a bunch of new followers! I don't have any exciting game progress to show today but new art coming SOON Also been working at getting a blog going so watch out for that, here's a little teaser of one of the article topics I have coming up coffee.coastwidesystems.com

I'm _really_ trying to get some solid game updates out but seems like every 5 min there's some tangential emergency/fire to put out Today's issue: a bird knocked out power to most of the town, then my Ubiquiti network gear shit the bed when I started powering stuff up 🤬

I don't like putting all my eggs in one basket... Game Devs and Publishers, if you're on Mastodon, link yourselves below ⬇️

I might be doing something wrong but...podman pods in quadlets _suck_. Run the containers in independent namespaces and they're fine, but put them in a pod? *Maybe* 12h uptime before something goes screwy and the entire pod crashes

Google replaced pushing Git tags for certain source code with obtaining source code via Google Drive after making a request through Google Forms. It's completely ridiculous and they've gradually become very slow at handling requests. They're in clear violation of the GPLv2 now.

It lives!!! PC is back in action; thankfully only the motherboard burned out & I was able to scrape together enough change for a replacement (helps that old hardware isn't ludicrously expensive). Freckles missed gaming nights as much as I did 😆

Guess it's not all bad having my PC out of commission. Still miss having a full sized monitor though, laptop screen real estate is pretty limited for gamedev

Had to head in to the city the other day with the kids & we encountered a cybertruck; my son (7) yelled out "it looks like it was designed by AI, I hope it doesn't break down in front of us!" Kid's gonna be alright 👍

Blue Bottle Games, as a policy, does not use generative AI. It's something we've discussed as a team, weighing the pros and cons, and ultimately, we decided it was not for us. Recently, while chatting with a colleague, she mentioned it was useful hearing our reasoning. So: Sharing time! 1/12

Definitely going to have to get references to these memes in Heat Retreat 😆

Been diverted from gamedev with some sysadmin shenanigans lately: the homelab was ailing after a long power outage and I went down a horrific rabbit hole

Happy Canada Day! 🇨🇦

With all the shitty news going about with digital media, here's a reminder that Heat Retreat will be 100% DRM free, forever! As for physical copies... I'd like to, but there are some pretty significant hurdles so stay tuned. I won't be stocking a Walmart isle, but maybe a limited run will be doable

Steam used real human artists for the Summer Sale art, then credited them by name W Steam. #gaming #indiegames #gamedev