Choose your destiny

#GTA@GameDEV
#meme@GameDEV

Good off topic: yesterday Kroshik the seal has been yet again released to the wild world after a whole decade in nerpa preservation centre in St. Petersburg.

First two times he got back to people and wasn't particularly impressed by the big world. They live up to 55 years and so it may take some time to mature and become brave.

The abandoned youngling was found as the tiniest pup the rescuers ever had, so they were not sure he'll ever make it. He grew strong, smart, but kinda spoiled and way too comfortable with people.

#OffTopic@GameDEV
#Aww@GameDEV

And this is why modern open world games suck at it: their animation systems are never actually making the eyes properly pointed at anyone in dialogues.

#GameDesign@GameDEV
#Valve@GameDEV
#Animation@GameDEV

Yikes 😬

#Blender@GameDEV
#AI@GameDEV

Since I wanted to have some fun during the weekend, I decided to use a better setup where local AI can have access to a bunch of tools in a very isolated environment.

It took me only 8 hours to make it at least run a reasonable CSS refactoring. By that time I'd probably refactor it myself already, but hey. No, I'm unironically not bad with CSS.

It required a 40 line workflow (in a system prompt) where it checks if it actually done something or just imagined it done something.

UPD: LOL, nope, it's still not any good

#meme@GameDEV
#AI@GameDEV

LOL (sadly, only iOS app has the toggle as of now, it will appear on other platforms later) — comments section is in the chat

#AI@GameDEV

Since I'm a reasonable adult person, I hid this kitten as my "document ready" console log

#Cats@GameDEV
#Programming@GameDEV

Get State of Mind for free!

We have Detroit Become Human at home, from the creators of Deponia (and that Gollum videogame). Only here you can sabotage your career, steal from best friend, be the worst possible husband and father, practice alcoholism for better writing — and all that is only one of multiple playable characters.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/state_of_mind
#Free@GameDEV

Crytek fired dozens more yet again (mostly among QA) and in this case I'm not surprised: they are independent and their last full release is Hunt Showdown (2018). Last collaboration Crysis Remastered (2020-21), but Saber Interactive took the big cut.

It's 2026, Crysis 4 is shelved and no games are officially in production. Their own engine has been only used for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.

#Crytek@GameDEV
#LayOffs@GameDEV

Open AI fan cozyblazex used GPT-6 to complete the original Portal. The AI succeeded, but:

- It could take pauses
- It had acces to guides
- It took 23h+ to complete
- And wasted ~$600

And that's under a heavily subsidized pieces per token. I mean, yeah, it's definitely curious but the pricing is just insane (make x50 to get non-subsidized cost of that — $30K to complete portal).

This should be noted that specialized AI models can do it faster and cheaper but general purpose ones usually can't. The core idea of the experiment if the model can do "anything".

In reality though, it is mostly able to do things that are well documented. It will not pass a new random game.

#AI@GameDEV

If Don't Nod will not find funding (after Tencent abandoned them), they will become insolvent in January of 2027. Most likely only a shell will exist to operate previous games.

They already let people go recently which helped to get a few extra months (previously they estimated the end date as November of 2026).

Vampyr, Banishers, Jusant, Lost Records, and Aphelion failed commercially. Overall the first signs of the downfall appeared back in 2024 when they halted public trading via request to the EU financial commission.

Unlike Crytek above, DN always kept making games from small indie projects to huge worlds like Banishers. They also kept pushing industry forward with the first PBR game (Remember me) up to the unique lighting in Jusant.

#DontNod@GameDEV
#Tencent@GameDEV
#LayOffs@GameDEV

EVE is moving to Python 3 in one of the biggest code migrations ever... the game used to run on a custom Python 2.7 since 2010.

#Python@GameDEV
#MMO@GameDEV
#Programming@GameDEV

A few months ago I warned that GFA Games, the studio behind Pioner (semi-online game) is probably faking their online due do 100% persistent chart. Every peak was exactly the same for weeks in a row which is absolutely impossible.

Look at the bottom graph: organic wobbly start, botted few months — consistent line, technical issues — huge downfall, another botted line, then they stopped paying for that in September.

They seemingly stopped doing so and the game is played by like 70-250 people, the servers are often down, and such. Their demo is also down and turned into 15KB placeholder.

Don't make live-service games on an indie+ budget, kids!

#Fail@GameDEV