Rami Ismail (رامي)

I'm Rami, indie dev, advisor, tool dev, community builder, & amateur pilot! I help good people make good games in good ways. Links: Courses: here Consultancy: here Newsletter: here LinkedIn: here Instagram: here AMA about gamedev, anytime.

Why? Why??

NEW: I spoke with current and former EA employees to understand how the latest layoff round played out and the realities of daily life at the U.S. publisher. The short version? EA is controlled by an executive class that "cannot fail, only be failed." Workers, then, will always pay the price.

Actions speak louder than words, personally I was in talks with Epic to get all my game assets on their Fab.com marketplace (for free) but cancelled the deal immediately. If they want slop, let them have slop.

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 🚮

This is probably the best ad I've seen against using generative AI: Mayer, who was an engineer at Google and a chief executive of Yahoo, has rotted her brain so much she can no longer classify her daughter as "empathetic, creative and an animal lover". The slide of competence is incredible.

Very outside of my normal posting but at the start of the year I had made getting back under 100kg a goal to reach before my birthday - used to be 96-100kg fairly consistently, but slowly went up to 125kg since COVID without noticing until late last year. My birthday is in 4 days.

Gotta admit that the painfully necessary USB-C followup to the Mango micro router is one gadget I'm very happy to receive. If you're traveling a lot & handle sensitive files or network configurations, the Mango was a must-have & I've recommended it endlessly. Will let y'all know how the 2 compares.

Its forever been the wildest thing being at games conferences -especially the largest ones- and the talk schedule is like - creating sincere art from playful naivete - balancing passion and health - how to dodge parental controls when monetizing toddlers - regrets from my 1st commercial codebase

Budgeting 101 was supposed to launch earlier today but due to a (minor) medical emergency I was unable to do the final checks and launch. Expect the course to launch tomorrow - a very solid course with some very useful resources attached - in my opinion. courses.ramiismail.com

Got a little annoyed at a tool again - a lot of blender addons trying to add WASD style movement were 1,500+ lines and getting it wrong. Unreal-like movement with panning, WASD nav and camera smoothing. controls configurable. GPL.💖 #blender #unrealengine #gamedev 🔗 codeberg.org/shaderwitch/...

Budgeting 101 was supposed to launch earlier today but due to a (minor) medical emergency I was unable to do the final checks and launch. Expect the course to launch tomorrow - a very solid course with some very useful resources attached - in my opinion. courses.ramiismail.com

Its forever been the wildest thing being at games conferences -especially the largest ones- and the talk schedule is like - creating sincere art from playful naivete - balancing passion and health - how to dodge parental controls when monetizing toddlers - regrets from my 1st commercial codebase

Yalla, Brazil, mabrouk!

Chances that anyone in Brazil and in game dev doesn't know Thais feel relatively low, but just in case: the results of Brazil's elections are going to heavily affect game dev as a viable cultural expression & viable career. It's a thread worth reading.

The fact that Tim, even when he was much younger, rebellious, and eager, could already not feel sadness for a beacon of game design & development innovation and creativity going under when he could back smugness with "economically realistic" explains so much of why Epic is where it is right now.

📢 Some exciting news! 🎉 Our upcoming next-generation runtime, GMRT, will be free for commercial use and source avaliable for all non-console platforms! READ MORE gamemaker.io/en/blog/gmrt...

At this point I even expect the eventual guillotines to have an app with a subscription, additional ads between uses, and a maximum amount of uses per week you can pay to expend.

"Game Pass subscribers will get a number of free cloud gaming hours every month: Game Pass Ultimate (at $23 a month) gets you 15 hours, Game Pass Premium ($15 a month) 10 hours, and Game Pass Essential ($10 a month) 5 hours. Extra hours need to be purchased." The fuck gizmodo.com/microsoft-an...

I think it's odd to live in a time where we're just past the peak of everything. In less then two decades, billionaires have stripped all progress, turned to warmongering, and ensured we will all suffer for their pissing contest. That said, luggage wheels are great.

this is the most linkedin a bluesky has ever done it

this is the most linkedin a bluesky has ever done it

I have been walking around the house randomly muttering "Bioware?!" in tones varying from incredulous to furious. It is somehow still impossible to grasp.

Game developers fear that thieving AI vibecoders will make free game demos a thing of the past aftermath.site/steam-next-fes...

The recently published PHP vulnerability affects all PHP versions between 5.4 and 8.4 - basically a decade of PHP releases. Wordpress runs on PHP. Drupal runs on PHP. My own presskit() runs on PHP. If you run PHP anywhere, you should go check which version it is -now-, and update if affected.

holy shit what a mess, everything about this is a clusterfuck of unfathomable proportions www.bbc.com/news/article...

At this point the only sensible conclusion is that the games industry is doing great but the desperate greed of capitalism keeps murdering us

I literally don't have words for the news of EA closing Bioware. Unconscionable, incompetent, soulless decision-making. May everyone involved in these decision suffer Renegade interrupts for the rest of their lives.

This is somehow the funniest and most appropriate typo of my name I've ever seen

Hadn't watched Agatha All Along, as it released right at the start of my Marvel-exhaustion. Just caught up with it to prepare for Visions' chapter of the Wandavision story, and excuse me why was this so good?

Latest Mike & Rami has been poppin, our biggest episode to date We ask the question: Is it even worth making games anymore? youtu.be/jb9oOdHYm4w?...

Came across walk at MängudeÖÖ in Tallinn, Estonia & genuinely think it might be my game of the year. It is painfully elegant, super simple, beautifully executed, the feelings just burst out of it, and it is engaging for exactly how long it lasts. It's like €2. store.steampowered.com/app/4563880/...

Today: "Billionaire former dev whose engineering firm has been mismanaged to the point it has to vibe-code a launcher takes offense at AI-critique of popular developer that every developer that started since 2015 or so adores; Elon Musk gets involved to support the side that is obviously wrong."

Kenney hit the infamous "two billionaires with one post" achievement, remains very rare, also shows once again that money does not equal intelligence, capability, or insight: Kenney is obviously right.

Random conversation has me wondering if you could get sued for false advertising if you sold a subpar vacuum cleaner with a product advertisement that says that "this vacuum sucks more than any other".

Thanks to editor because every time the connection dropped I tried to change something about my setup and it got pretty silly

Came across walk at MängudeÖÖ in Tallinn, Estonia & genuinely think it might be my game of the year. It is painfully elegant, super simple, beautifully executed, the feelings just burst out of it, and it is engaging for exactly how long it lasts. It's like €2. store.steampowered.com/app/4563880/...

"This work of fiction was designed, developed and produced by a multicultural team of various cultures, faiths, sexualities, and dental plan eligibilities."

I'm on a big boat and for those who've been following me long enough, damn this thing has a nice engine.

I feel every time anyone writes "developed with a core team of XX" about a game, they have a responsibility to write "developed by YY developers with only XX developers being employed"

I have to say y'all, reading great games reviews from players is amazing, but reading great courses reviews from fellow developers is something else. So grateful for the interest the courses program has generated. courses.ramiismail.com

Oh hey, this is a lot sooner than I was expecting. Game looks great, get on it.