Tone

I’ll hold my excitement. Very curious though!

This is very cool. Something I lament about my brain is I’m sort of a one project man, and while it helps me finish large projects I tend not to make time for cool side quests. Maybe I can be intentional about building out that way too.

It's 2005. You discover music through radio, friends, or just YOLO'ing an album. You go to the store and buy "eggs" and the only real distinction is carton color. When you buy games it's down at Game Stop on a physical disk. But somebody just introduced you to this cool thing called Pandora and their "Music Genome Project" and a friend down the road says she buys all her eggs from local farms because "it's more ethical". Nobody discusses these things down at Game Stop. But there's whispering of this thing called Steam which could be pretty cool (but no way you're buying a PC without a CD drive that would be insane). Fast forward to 2026, you've got at least one streaming subscription with music stations completely tuned to your taste. The store has 15 different types of eggs and you can't tell the difference but you recognize the choice you make is somehow a moral issue youtube.com/shorts/ZptaSCR0n… And for games, Steam is the storefront of the entire internet and it's working hard to cater to you. And you ditched the CD drive by 2010. I'm beginning to think we're in the beginning market stages of the Gaming Genome Project and moral-identity-purchasing of games where people will open their wallets not just to buy games (or eggs) but to take a moral stand for how they want those things to be produced. I've seen this in myself and in other gamers through things like @kabrutusdeid DEI Detected Steam curation. It's not a new phenomenon that people have opinions not just of the content, but about how the content was made and by whom. You see it in the celebrations and lamentations around the closure of Bioware. We're already doing it, with the tools and networks we have available to us. And Steam is, for better or for worse, trying to cope with the speed with which this current iteration of moralization around gaming is manifesting. It isn't really about stopping AI (they won't, it's here, it's too late), it isn't about what particular arguments people have as to WHY they prefer games made with/without AI or how often some set of the anti ai crowd score own goals by revealing they can't, in fact, tell the difference between "ai slop" and something made by a human teapawt.net/SHL0MS/status/20542806… It's about expressing an opinion about how the world SHOULD work, regardless of how it is, and we're in the early stages where instead of every taste in the market being catered to and personalized, ala Pandora for games (later to be made obsolete by [insert streaming service], we're at the stage where the moralists are attempting to force their opinion on the market. It's loud and obnoxious right now. It will harm sales right now. But if you asked me to make a choice between YOLO'ing albums like in 2005 and streaming, I'll take the personalized taste of streaming every time. And I'll buy the cheapest eggs unless they've got the blue ones, and then ONLY BECAUSE my wife says she likes the taste better (I can't tell the difference). In the future, gaming will be so specific, so hyper sensitive to the things you like and how you want it to have been made that every option will be catered to. The complaining will localize itself to the circles who care about it, an the rest of us will buy whatever product fits our own ideas of how to spend our money. The bigger problem to solve will be getting your friends to try the games that don't fit their filters.

What the fuck

Interesting result. 1. Raised-axe orc, based on the card’s pose and light. 2. Orc carrying the tome, based directly on your second image. 3. Tome of the Orc, a book-focused concept. Terra did a great job with a direct "port this image to pixels"! but more original art was very bad

Pixel Art marked "Safe" 3 model comparison (astra, sol, terra) on all thinking levels low-> max. Column one is based on a pixel art reference, two is based on an image generation, and three is based on a verbal description of the object where this would be used. Oneshots using lua scripts with aesprite. Spoiler: I'm not using them. To be fair, the direction is somewhat vague and the announcement specifically points out computer use and gives an example in a 3d program. So I'm following up with a computer use example to see how it looks. But this is likely not the use case for Terra.

Performance saving with art over particles. Swapped over from a particle based, "I dunno the agent just kind of did it this way but it looks pretty good" to "use aseprite and animate using actual frames" and not only is the look better, its more in line with the theme and saved a ton of extraneous work.

For me sound design is still one of the most difficult parts of building. The dashboard is useful, and I'm scouring the internet for decent audio (I've already bought a pack I use for every game interaction, but its weak on spell FX). What packs do people recommend? Free or paid. And to experienced game devs, do you usually take what's given or do you adjust the sound further? I could see myself doing both, but my ear isn't well trained to audio nuance yet.

Iterating on portal animations with set pixel budgets and distinctive colors. Not sure which one is my favorite though. Still feels like it needs something

Good take

Warcraft 3 coded 🤘 teapawt.net/Vortyndev/status/21140…

Pixel Art Spell FX A breakdown of one of the spell effects in Summoners, the Magic Missile Barrage. Using GPT6.1 Sol and Astra, giving the agents direction to use Aseprite has made for astonishingly solid results. This isn't a one shot. It's dozens of iterations but constraining technique to using actual tools real pixel artists use in order to achieve the effect.

There is something majestic about the pixelart aesthetic applied to 3d. My favorite image of all time is the single tree on the hill inside the moon in Majora's Mask, not pixel art but the grainy N64 graphics feel similar to this. @re_skob 's project gives me the same tingles. Gorgeous work.

Cooking with chatgpt voice is so much fun. Makes me wonder if just having somebody to talk you through every little step might make it enjoyable for people who previously decided they "can't cook." Son of a bitch told me to say hello to my wife for it though. Have to watch out for that.

Some concept imagery based on the game maps I'm fiddling with to get ideas for single player. I'm thinking 10 missions to start, but given the strict original focus on multiplayer, I'm worried variety would get stale if I keep the format similar.

This sounds incredibly natural and yet it immediately trips my “this person is not a native English speaker” heuristics. Very foreign student who grew up speaking English in elementary school then returned home for the next 15 years sounding.

Borrowing from one of the greats, Supreme Commander, I added Strategic Zoom for when the battle starts to get too large to monitor up close.

Magical intervention and anticipating your opponents moves are key components to victory in Summoners