Just released v1.3 of my #UE5 SDF generator plugin for UE5.8 support
Also now has some material functions to make procedural, irregular, self-intersecting, n-sided polygons. A thing that probably no one will ever need for their video games
github.com/rtm223/RTMSDF
Someone ran a poll on X, asking players if they would prefer "all games on Steam made by humans" or "all games on Epic made by AI".
139,568 people voted, with just 1.6% voting for AI and Epic.
Faith in humanity restored!
Little Troubles in Spooky Town is out now! ✨ Check out the tiny adventure game I've made during #GirlyGameJam, I hope you'll enjoy it!
kenney.itch.io/little-troub...
Feeling down about the AI focused re-launch of a certain game jam? fear not, I am putting together a week long gamejam celebrating Human Made creations, come join us and make some cool stuff in the Hand Crafted Jam. itch.io/jam/hand-cra...#GameDev#IndieDev
I keep on getting these AI-Generated cold calling emails that entirely fail to communicate who is contacting me, or about what.
Even if the goal is "volume of outreach", surely you want people to know what the pitch is. Surely you want to communicate *something* to me?
Presumably they've got an agent out there scraping websites for potential contacts (annoying, but sure, I get the idea), but why let the agent send utter word salad to those contacts?
Something that's really funny about Tim Sweeney's crusade against AI disclosures on Steam is that he has proven himself to be uniquely inept at running a pc games store
Like why would Valve care what he thinks about their business when he took a swing for them and missed completely
Sooo.. We heard about that "sandbox" thing that everyone's been talking about and after several months of struggling to wrap our heads around it... Yeah ok, we finally understand why you'd want that. Please give us more money, we're very smart
hang on, so Bleecker Street was sold to a Pierre Omidyar-backed group that also happens to back Tosca Musk's Passionflix... and now "MUSK" is disappearing from theaters?
This is a thing in UK law, where courts can bar someone from being a director or other person with significant control of a registered company (usually for a period of time), similar to banning someone from driving if they do so recklessly.
Tonight in about 3 hours (8pm US Eastern-ish) I'll be checking out a game demo, BOLD: Networked Newt Action by friend of the channel @soft-rodvt.itch.io and crew.
It's like umm, indiecore homebrew Spies vs. Mercs. But actually Furries vs. Scalies.
store.steampowered.com/app/4153760/...
Once you're fining a company $25B for violating laws, you really do need to be identifying he people responsible and either
A) Sending them to prison, or preferably
B) Removing *entirely* their ability to manage businesses or hold stocks
I genuinely believe there needs to be a legal structure for us, as a society, to say, "you ran this company so bad and did so much harm to us, that you will never be allowed anywhere near influence over another company again"
Like, you can still have a job, and a pension account, maybe even let you invest in funds or some other indirect investments. But you're not having a executive or management position, nor trade stocks again, and all your prior stocks are held by a government trust now
sorry but the replies here are whack. co-dev is good and healthy for the industry. co-dev means that when you finish your project, instead of laying off the surge of people you hired to finish the game, they go work on a different game with a different core team and different publisher.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer was made by a core team of 75 people. "What we wanted to do was keep that core small, smaller than perhaps you might have done in the past, and scale capacity and capability with what we call distributed development." https://bit.ly/4hT02qg
I'm begging you all. I know this stuff is frustrating and exhausting and scary but you have to stop catastrophising and buying into the AI "inevitability" narrative. Cause it's sure as hell not even vaguely close to a done deal
FYI, the Next Fest page has updated! Where previously it was slop, my top recommendations in the main listing are:
Dead of the Brain
Queen's Domain
ReBlade
Annalynn MD
Anomalith
TETRIC (which is new to me and looks WILD)
Derelikt
Godzilla: DAMM
Surfpunk
Prison Of Husks
Hell Wait
Zero AI. Told ya.
And when you waver in that belief, as is reasonable in these times, maybe take it up with some friends to discuss in private instead of broadcasting it to the world? You don't have to do free PR work for some of the worst companies on the planet
Seriously, go check it out now. The transformation after 48 hours and they have some numbers to work with is staggering.
It also confirms what I keep saying: Nobody is actually buying these AI games. Or even playing them for free. The only time they get any airtime is when it's random & unranked.
FYI, the Next Fest page has updated! Where previously it was slop, my top recommendations in the main listing are:
Dead of the Brain
Queen's Domain
ReBlade
Annalynn MD
Anomalith
TETRIC (which is new to me and looks WILD)
Derelikt
Godzilla: DAMM
Surfpunk
Prison Of Husks
Hell Wait
Zero AI. Told ya.
Okay, people are already getting really depressed and frustrated with the Next Fest, so I'll say what I said last time round:
Wait a day or two. They order the games on the pages by hours played, and 99% of the AI garbage will sink like a stone. Right now it's just undifferentiated and unranked.
Part of my literal job is to fly out to physical game studios to rescue and recover historical materials that might be endangered and put them in a permanent archive. @gamehistoryorg.bsky.social is a 501(c)3 publicly funded to do that, my DMs are open, and I'm free for the next couple weeks...
I've been thinking a lot recently about how videogames "just cost so much to make now", yet no one wants to acknowledge the choices that go into a AAA game budget
Years of "our strategy is fewer, bigger games" and/or "only live services"... Yeah, no wonder games got expensive to make 🙄
I am begging every AAA exec and platform holder: THINK SMALLER.
Growth forever in ANYTHING is impossible. And now is a moment to lean into the art form and create the goodwill you’ll need to propel forward after this cursed AI stuff is put in the ground.
Also continuing to chase fidelity and realism by default, for a whole ass decade since we hit severe diminishing returns has been a huge driver of cost spirals in game budgets
"PS5/XBox series hardware increased budgets dramatically" - no it didn't, it just enabled execs to CHOOSE to increase costs
Obvs, big fancy expensive games deserve to get made, but making that the ONLY play in certain corners of the industry has been a catastrophic move and pretending that game budgets are just a force of nature is kind of embarrassingly naive
I've been thinking a lot recently about how videogames "just cost so much to make now", yet no one wants to acknowledge the choices that go into a AAA game budget
Years of "our strategy is fewer, bigger games" and/or "only live services"... Yeah, no wonder games got expensive to make 🙄
I am begging every AAA exec and platform holder: THINK SMALLER.
Growth forever in ANYTHING is impossible. And now is a moment to lean into the art form and create the goodwill you’ll need to propel forward after this cursed AI stuff is put in the ground.
There's a million levers you can push on to change the budget of your game, and it turns out cranking them all up to max all the time is going to cost a lot of money
Yes, inflation has made a difference, but that's not causing you to spend $300M on a spiderman game. Scoping choices are
Folks panicking over that one demo graph from Next Fest should probs come look at this graph and calm back down. Seriously, Steam's algorithms are remarkably good at just sending slop straight into the abyss. Nobody wants this shit.
just wanted to share something i discovered
the amount of games released in 2022 compared to this year has increased by 77%. I use 2022 because that marks the last year before AI really took over the internet
whats crazy to me is that the amount of games with ZERO REVIEWS has ALMOST TRIPLED. ZERO?
NVIDIA seems to be channel stuffing, forcing Amazon and other customers to take early delivery. The argument that these things are "scarce" when you don't even have anywhere to plug them into is nonsense...unless NVIDIA is saying you NEED to take them now, or else.
GPUs are stacked in warehouses.
Business Insider also reporting that Amazon projects it would take delivery of $3 billion a month in GPUs “every month for the foreseeable future,” all while not having anywhere to put them, as part of an “early rack receipt” program. Extremely strange!
- 3D action espionage PVP on Unreal Engine 5.8
- Revival of the classic Spies vs Mercs game mode
- Absolutely no AI, whatsoever.
- Demo available now
Download today as a part of @steampowered.com Next Fest at boldgame.online
. @soft-rodvt.itch.io has been cooking up an exquisite spies vs mercs style game and i highly recommend checking out the demo with some friends! SVM as a game mode is inherently a bit complex off the bat, asymmetrical always is, but it's a blast to play
- 3D action espionage PVP on Unreal Engine 5.8
- Revival of the classic Spies vs Mercs game mode
- Absolutely no AI, whatsoever.
- Demo available now
Download today as a part of @steampowered.com Next Fest at boldgame.online
I'm really not enjoying the current trend of people who don't like AI doing big PR pushes for AI on the timeline. You just don't gotta do it.
I know it's exhausting and a little scary, but you absolutely don't need to declare any unearned victories to your opponents. That's a weird thing to do.
The entire nature of the last decade of tech hype cycles has been dipshits declaring victory long before they have achieved it and then failing
I know this one is bigger and arguably more real, but it's also kinda as fake as the others and you do not have to declare premature victories for them 
Seeing a lot of people catastrophising about the state of AI in Next Fest who very, very clearly do not understand how Next Fest works
Dominic is 100% correct here. Valve's far from perfect but they've been actively, and quite successfully, trying to manage this issue
Last Next Fest is was like 50% AI garbage on the front page at first. The moment they had some actual data, you had to go through HUNDREDS of games to find anything significantly slopped up.
"A game about the joy of designing ships, and nothing else."
Okay, I lied. But anyone paying attention knows I've been popping turrets from ships I designed since 2018... Now it's your turn.
The multiplayer playtest kicks off next week. Join via
player.gg/explore/game...#shipshaper#indiedev