Hi I wrote about the making of classic platformerChuckie Egg and talked to its creator Nigel Alderton. Please give it a read as I want to show there’s an audience for this gaming history stuff 🙏
www.theguardian.com/games/2026/a...
VERY COOL PERSON: It's four-twenty, you know what that means?
ME: Hell yeah! [starts shoving blackbirds into a pie]
Congratulations Sam!
Reposting with alt text
I have a bunch of promo stuff I wanted to do, hindered by having like three different flavours of illness simultaneously, but maybe I’ll get some done!
Actually it is, of course, Next Level which is coming out in just a few weeks on May 7th! It’s a friendly exploration of the world of procedural generation, games and game designers, and you can preorder it here: linktr.ee/next_level (Thanks Kayn!)
Ah I mean I’d love to but as you can see it’s in my to-read pile so I’m still a ways off getting to it. bsky.app/profile/kayn...
How’s everyone’s reading pile of shame looking so far in 2026? I keep trying to find more time to read but it’s so hard.
Looking up at a church steeple surrounded by greenery.
Looking up at Battersea Power Station's chimneys reflected in a glass window.
A tiny plant growing out of a wall with a row of glass skyscrapers out of focus in the distance.
A gold statue atop an old building.
📸
Dunno if this is useful at all but ezgif.com has a number of gif functions that have saved my butt, including frame range deletion! (Although it just uses ffmpeg under the hood)
You can hear the behind-the-scenes story of Titanium Court on Monday.
OR you can support indie journalism for $5 and hear it (plus tons of other interviews) right now!
It's out!!!!
You too can make Henry go outside and plant a tree for less than the cost of a cup of coffee!
With this one handy link...
store.steampowered.com/app/3531490/...
BAFTA pulling a trailer for an autobiographical game about surviving sexual assault only hours before it was said to be a part of a showcase is an exceptionally bad look.
Neon says "The future is queer"
For those outside academia: if you apply for ERC funding and fail to get it, you can’t reapply for two years - now being extended to three. There’s no reason to do this except to slow down applications, because there is not enough money anywhere.
I’m so tired, man.
Very funny to do this three months after the shitstorm over AI-generated paper summaries. A bizarre choice motivated by nothing.
Bad example though cos we would 100% be covering for the dog in that instance.
Why are some typos inherently funnier than others. Someone must have done research on this.
a Mii version of Blahaj, the stuffed shark from IKEA and latter-day trans icon, says "trans rights... I always wanted to say that"
✨ iconic ✨
I don’t want to cast aspersions but I feel like he might have a vested interest somewhere.
Aww. I’m really glad! It’s good to know my perspective is useful, it’s a topic so much has been said about in just a few weeks haha.
Thanks so much! So glad you enjoyed it.
That’s my read on it yeah. He sees it as the default way to render going forwards (I mean he said this in a bullshit interview but)
One more ping for this? Why not. I wrote about DLSS 5 for RPS, what it means for us to live in a world without graphics rendering and how easy it might be for us to lose control of the games industry: www.rockpapershotgun.com/with-dlss-5-...
thanks so much nic! so glad you enjoyed it.
There’s a bit in this around sixteen minutes in where Lu chops up an airhorn sample and it’s better than every viral livecoding clip you’ve ever seen, how do they do it, man.
If any sites/outlets would like to commission me to write about AI, procedural generation or creative technology, please drop me a line! My DMs are open or you can email me: mike@possibilityspace.org
I'm long since out of the freelance game so I don't really know who accepts pitches or such.
To my knowledge that's not how they're using the term - they see it as a one-way process where they get a bunch of frame information (and other context) out of the game, and render an entire frame from that themselves using a trained model.
