Doom is a form of mum game. Any game in which you clean the level meticulously and thoroughly before moving on and then the next time you return its a mess again is a mum game

Okay so you might see this video with the audio muted. Now imagine how the music must sound like. I urge you to unmute and listen to what it's actually like because I guarantee you you're not prepared for it.

“Listen wherever you get your podcasts” is the simplest explanation of decentralization.

@bridgettodd.bsky.social, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet, explains how podcasts are portable and resistant to centralized control.

Full ep, out now.

This year's Game Developers Conference was unlike any other GDC is where game developers go to pull back the curtain on the biggest games, but never-ending layoffs and a focus on AI made the vibes rancid

i loved reading this www.polygon.com/gdc-2026-gam...

If we're doing game design doc discourse, I highly, highly recommend following this template from @kchironis.bsky.social

Jesus this is insightful banger after banger.

I don’t know if you’re posting elsewhere but I think bsky isn’t the right crowd to appreciate this. I think people who left Twitter for mastadon dream of evolving the internet into something new, while those who came to bsky dream of going back to a 2010-style internet

A green Lego pickup truck (set 31007). Behind are instruction manuals for building the truck, a helicopter or a robot mech. In front are some unused pieces.

This Lego truck was just a little impulse buy but I had a great time building it tonight. Maybe because it’s from a 3-in-1 pack, it’s full of parts used in creative and unexpected ways. Surprising to the end! Set 31007

it is a picture like the other #my9games pictures but this one has the sylvie game "cat planet" on it 9 times

#my9games

After several nights of practice, my son can fall asleep while holding a Hotwheels car in each hand without dropping them or releasing his grip

From magic to malware: How OpenClaw's agent skills become an attack surface | 1Password The same capabilities that make OpenClaw a groundbreaking tool also make it an urgent security risk. This blog contains confirmed examples of agent skills being used as malware vectors, and advice on ...

1Password not mincing words here:

"If you are experimenting with OpenClaw, do not do it on a company device. Full stop."

"If you have already run OpenClaw on a work device, treat it as a potential incident and engage your security team immediately."

1password.com/blog/from-ma...

This NYT-Connections-alike is very upsetting thomaswc.com/2025.html

And he said, "If everyone likes it, it means it's mainstream. It means it's conventional. It means it's already pre-digested for people to like it. And I don't want that. I want people to end up liking things they didn't like when they first encountered it, because that's where you really end up loving something."

Keep thinking about this term "pre-digested" that Kojima used to describe art that's instantly gratifying. And how it's better when people grow to love something instead.

I've gravitated, as player and designer, toward the latter, but that term "pre-digested" is new and feels very strong.

at a certain level of any creative or intellectual collaborative job the main task is sin-eater: to fix what you can and get blamed for what you can’t, secretly knowing how much worse it would have been if you hadn’t done what you did.

The Space Exploration Logo Archive Good luck losing less than an hour to this: a huge archive of logos for government, non-profit, private, military, and even fictional space agencies and companies. There is also a book, but it looks like it was only

Good luck losing less than an hour to this: a huge archive of logos for government, non-profit, private, military, and even fictional space agencies and companies. [kottke.org]

friday soapbox: as a designer, if you want something to be a skillful action for players, and you want growth in this skill to be very deep/meaningful, then you need to also let players be bad at it. sometimes horrendously bad. players hate this pain, and designers often want to mitigate it away.

We got some lightweight hoodies from Alternative Apparel with subtle branding that lots of people still wear years later

I want to get a good price on a Lego set that’s retiring at the end of this year. I’m watching the price in maybe eight different stores, seeing it get discounted (but not enough for me) and then sell out in more and more of them. Will anyone have stock left for the big Black Friday sales?

This might be the one I use the most:

developer: put it down. we don't need another one

concept artist: (clutching tighter) no. this is my emotional support sky whale

I can’t believe I didn’t know this. The feature was added in 1993!

Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe) to direct a "Moomins" animated feature film.
variety.com/2025/film/ne...

a giant lego skeleton made out of styrofoam as a halloween decoration

OMG this is amazing

www.instructables.com/LEGO-Skeleto...

it's frustrating when, for example, in a platformer, there's a really hard jump right at the end of the level. so you can come up with game design rules like don't put hard jumps at the end of the level, put something that looks scary but is actually easy to make the player feel good, etc.

My son pointing when a train goes past

So You’re Making a Pixel Art Game? The brutal 5% success rate and how to beat it

Really nice marketing analysis on pixelart games. Writer knows his datapoint. I was very impressed.
opgamemarketing.substack.com/p/so-youre-m...

It was back in the early 90s, a time when there was no internet, no email, no Excel, no text files, no TrueType fonts—nothing of what we have today. I had to come up with a solution to deliver all the text data to the developer in Hungary (Novotrade), where no one spoke Japanese. First, I created bitmap images of all the hiragana and katakana characters, as well as commas, periods, exclamation points, question marks, and two types of overstrikes (two dots/circles), something like this: ・・・■■■・・・・・・・・・・ ・・・・■■・・■■■・・・・・ ■■■■■■■■■■■・・・・・ ・■■■■■■■■・・・・・・・ ・・・・■■・・・・・・・・・・ ・・・・■■・■■・・・・・・・ ・・・■■■■■■■■■・・・・ ・・■■■■■■■■■■■・・・ ・■■・■■・■■・・■■■・・ ・■■・■■・■■・・・■■・・ ■■・・■■■■・・・・■■■・ ■■・・・■■・・・・・■■■・ ■■・・■■■■・・・・■■・・ ■■■■■・■■・・・■■・・・ ・■■■・・・・・・■■・・・・ ・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

I then printed all characters page by page and FAXED nearly 100 pages to the developer, and their artist converted them into nicely shaded Japanese fonts. Each character was assigned a code based on rules such as: H for hiragana, K for katakana 01, 02, 03, 04, 05 for vowel rows A, K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W for consonant columns d for overstriking dots, c for overstriking circles sp for space (Note: I might not remember all the rules perfectly now, lol.) For example, the phrase "こんにちは" should be converted to something like: H05K, H05W, H02N, H02T, H01H The developer sent me all the in-game dialogues via fax. I translated them and assigned each string a number for easy reference, instead of saying something like "the third window of the second dolphin in stage 2." Now here's the best part: once I finished translating all the dialogues, I typed them into a word processing program (like an early version of WordPad), then converted each letter to its corresponding code, character by character.

I printed all of this out and faxed dozens of pages to the developer, who then had to convert them back into dialogue data. To my surprise, the system we created was quite robust. There were only a few text-related bugs, mostly caused by my typos. I still work in game localization. It feels like we were in the stone age compared to today's methods, but I still cherish those moments.

Ryoichi Hasegawa on the localisation process for the Japanese version of Ecco the Dolphin (released in June 1993 in Japan):
xcancel.com/rio_hasegawa...

cover of James Gurney's "Dinotopia"

cover of "Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons"

screenshot of the cool "guys with weapons sneakily floating up a rock" intro scene from Dune Part 2

cover of "Redwall" by Brian Jacques

game narrative people like to talk about how worldbuilding isn’t storytelling. i agree; in fact i think worldbuilding is actually its own emerging creative practice, with its own virtuosos & masterpieces; it overlaps with storytelling but often feels to me more like architecture, hypertext, collage

The background on this waterfall, from the game's director Takatsuna Senba

(the whole interview is pretty great stuff:
web.archive.org/web/20191230...)