Took part in the Galway Game Jam over the weekend, and made a bizarre game where you watch a rather bad FPS player playing against a high-level smurf account, but you can take partial control to help them aim, dodge, or taunt their opponent into making mistakes.

I've been revisiting physics-object grabbing. My conclusion so far is that physics systems are a great way to produce strange and unusual quirks. #GameDev #UnrealEngine

10x10? Nope nope nope nope.

Somewhat related, I never knew that you could double-click on a cell in minesweeper to reveal the adjacent non-flagged cells. I showed the prototype of Darknets to someone at a game dev meetup a while back, and they complained about this missing feature, so I just added it.

I haven't done much work on Darknets in a while - I've been a bit burned out on gamedev after my save/load plugin sold poorly - so I decided to open the project and start with something small and of no real consequence. These little games are quick and fun to make.

I think the most fun thing in the demo was vaulting around the map using the boxing glove gun. The level has a lot of vertical design to support this.

After the tutorial, the actual level is much darker and more atmospheric though.

I can't get over how bright everything is, very unusual for an immersive sim with stealth.

I'm now going to try the Spectra demo!

I finally got my RX 9070 XT back from RMA, after its fan enclosure suffered a critical failure back in January. Time to play some modern games again!

It's not speculation, it's right there in GW's announcement. I'm surprised more people aren't making a bigger fuss about this. The Black Library was great exactly because they gave you DRM-free books you could read on whatever app or reader you wanted.

I've played too many multiplayer games. I'm just glad the time I spent playing League of Legends back in its early days wasn't tracked.

Pravin Lal's quote is relevant once again: "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

I made a very short horror game as part of the Galway Global Game Jam site. You play a small child who has awoken from a nightmare and has to make it to their mother's room at the far end of a long and scary corridor, armed only with... well, your arm.

Today I discovered that someone has recently made a huge fan patch for Evil Islands, my favourite forgotten gem of a game from 2001. Fixes bugs, updates textures, and makes it not instantly crash if I try to run it in 4K. Link to the mod: www.nexusmods.com/evilislandsc...

Been playing a strategy game called Driftland, mostly because it sounded a bit like Majesty (it isn't really.) But it's set on a world shattered by magic, which is honestly a cool and underused setting. You can even magically drag chunks of the shattered world around to build on them.

I forgot to take a photo before taking the card out, but I did find this photo (from someone on Reddit with the same problem), which shows roughly what happened. I'm currently trying to RMA it, but the retailer has been very slow to reply, and the manufacturer just tells me to contact the retailer.

I made a system for physics object impact and scraping sounds. Working with the collision impact events in #UnrealEngine is annoying, it generates huge numbers of hit events that I needed to filter. (Video has sound.)

I really wish there was an alternative to @firefox.com and their push for AI garbage no one wants. Ladybird Browser can't come fast enough.

Oops, I made a feature I probably won't even use - non-square inventory item shapes. @filthy-dragons.bsky.social asked me if it was possible to make an editable grid variable like this, so I did. And then I thought I might as try using it in my inventory system.

Hmmmm.

I watched the entirety of The Expanse - a really good hard-sci-fi series. I'd seen the first 2 seasons when they were new, but not the rest. Sadly, I didn't like the last 2 seasons as much, particularly because of a certain thing at the end of S5 caused by... real-life events affecting the plot.

Not working gave me time to finally play through The Witcher 3 - something I'd been meaning to do for years, but where its length was too daunting. And, yes, as a completionist, that game + DLC is insanely long.

As an aside, I made so many different variations of that capsule art before I finally decided on the one I finally used. I was mostly trying different colour schemes. In the end I went for a background that faded into the Fab page, to help the icon and text stand out.

I also got laid off from my job, then spent several months developing a really flexible save/load plugin for Unreal. Put it up on Fab, then was disappointed when it got very little interest and only a handful of sales. But hey, at least I have a system I can use in my own future games!

I took part in three game jams in 2025 - two as the primary coder, and one as a 3D artist. Already planning to take part in the Global Game Jam again at the end of January!

The other thing I want to talk about is the GTA-style minimap showing the path to your next objective. That thing, plus the fact that the game is designed around you having it, is really distracting and takes away from the game's actual level design and graphics.

Because you only have to "equip" your skills in a very limited number or slots, you often end up buying skills and not even being able to use them because you have no free slots. Spending your levels and effectively getting nothing feels awful.

While it was a good game, it was a bit too long honestly. Writing was always the strong point in these games, and it was fairly consistently good there (apart from one or two badly-written quests); gameplay was mostly okay but had a few issues.

I finally finished playing The Witcher 3 and all its expansions. Only took me 259 hours! Much less than the nearly 10 years it took me to get around to playing it.