This is lovely. My daughter's in grammar school, and keeps bringing them home. She now has the site open on my iPad, and is drawing them. Thank you for sharing this!
I've been keeping an eye out on AI disclosures on Steam (https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/the-surprising-new-number-o...). While it's unsurprising that devs are using it, what was surprising was the number of games that disclose it. I believe, as of November, it's up to 8% of the while library. The biggest game to disclose AI use right now is Stellaris (with many many millions in sales), though having initially launched many years ago, their GenAI usage is in product updates.
Raph is, at once, incredibly accomplished, thoughtful about design, and humble about it. I once caught him coming off an international flight, and he was excitedly showing off a game he'd coded on the plane. He genuinely loves working on the stuff and thinking about it.
His writing is often SO full of ideas that I can't absorb an entire piece in one sitting. It's like a 12 course tasting menu. The neat thing with his writing is that, despite what he says here about all 12 pieces being important together, you can often just pick an isolated bit and chew on it for a while, and still learn something.
(Presumably return to the other 11 courses later; they'll still be fresh.)
I thought this concept would have found more traction in the world of procgen (in games), because it's pretty neat. But I found it difficult to work with, so perhaps others also did!
That video's great because it breaks down how Psygnosis managed to get 12 layers of parallax scrolling at 50fps and 128 colors on-screen. I never really loved the game as much as (say) Blood Money, but it was an awesome accomplishment in the same way demoscene demos were!
I loved this one back in the day, and have referenced it within the past month. The author felt that simply changing "cloud" to "butt" was less funny. But that always brings to mind the 1994 TSR mage-to-wizard search-and-replace: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/s82mi4/til_that_in_199...
Fantastic piece. I love stuff with interactivity; and the comparison between blur types is great, as your eye can evaluate them side-by-side. Thanks for putting it together!
About yen years ago, I built a site that scraped Steam and spat out the ~100 most recently-released games in a skimmable format: http://www.whatsonsteam.com
There's a lot of weirdness that launches each day, but also lots of interesting-looking stuff.