adamrezich

I've seen people genuinely wonder how one would go about making a 2D platformer without a generalized third-party physics engine—as though every single classic 2D platformer didn't have its own simple, bespoke physics simulation!

There are entire classes (even genres) of video games that don't require substantial third-party library support, and it's frustrating to see that this seems to be more and more of a minority view as time goes on.

> Without all those libraries you are bound to make boring 2d platformers.

Perhaps if you're completely devoid of imagination.

It is in fact possible to make video games without deferring to open-source libraries for every single aspect of it.

So, how many years until we'll see results, then?

Finally, some good video game development news!

> In addition, although this case is about mystery boxes, we feel the need to address comments made by the NYAG about games, real world violence, and children. Those extraneous comments are a distraction and a mischaracterization we’ve all heard before. Numerous studies throughout the years have concluded there is no link between media (movies, TV, books, comics, music, and games) and real world violence. Indeed, many studies highlight the beneficial impact of games to users.

This is apparently in reference to this NYAG press release: https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2026/attorney-general-james-...

> In addition, although this case is about illegal gambling, it is important to note that Valve’s promotion of games that glorify violence and guns helps fuel the dangerous epidemic of gun violence, particularly among young gamers who can become numbed to grave violence before their brains are fully developed.

Shameful!

Very disappointed that this article ends just before it starts to get into anything concrete and interesting—I'm working on solving (a simplified subset of) very similar problems for a game I'm working on, and would love to learn more about the author's approach!

Apparently it's Win+Shift+F23.

Inform 7 is actually kind of fun to write once you get the hang of it.

What's interesting though is, at least in my experience, LLMs are terrible at generating Inform 7 code specifically because it's so uncanny-valley-similar to English.

> Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.

Is it the context menu key? Or did they do another Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Win+L thing?

Most people believe that most things are knowable, and happily defer to published statistics whenever possible.

Imagine a world where Microsoft was pushing “Copilot” integration everywhere, just as they are in this one—but the proof was, actually, in the pudding. Windows was categorically improving, without regression, with each subsequent update. Long-standing frustrations with the operating system experience were gradually being ironed out. Parts of the system that were slow, frustrating, convoluted, or all three, were being thoughtfully redesigned without breaking backwards compatibility, and we were watching this all unfold in real time, in awe of the power of “AI”, eyes wide with hope for the future of software, and computing in general.

Think of how dramatically this hypothetical alternate reality differs from the one we live in, and then consider just how galling it is that these people have the nerve to piss on our leg and then tell us it's raining. Things are not getting better. This supposedly-magical new technology isn't observably improving things where it matters most—rather, it's demonstrably hastening the decline of the baseline day-to-day software that we depend upon.

Regardless of “what kind of ‘remake’” they were going for, they had about twice the development cycle of the original game to make it. None of the successful AAA “remakes” of the past few years (most of which are Japanese) had development cycles this long.

The failed remake in question is for Sands of Time (2003–2004) rather than for the original Prince of Persia (1989)—though, judging by this catastrophe, the remake development team wouldn't have been able to remake the original game in seven years either!

This is a 23-year-old game we're talking about here.

The design work was complete long before anyone working on this project was hired by Ubisoft, and proven in the form of a game that shipped several console generations ago. Ubisoft presumably still has all of the original art assets for reference.

All that had to be done was to study the original game code, port it for modern systems, and then polish up the visuals some. Not a trivial amount of work by any means, but much, much easier than starting from scratch and making a game from nothing.

This should've been a layup for any competent studio given SEVEN YEARS(!!!) to work on the project.

That it wasn't, is undeniable evidence of a AAA game development competency crisis.

Very sad to see Paul Graham boosting this slop on X.

“I loved when the violent terrorists made sure to respect the velvet ropes in Statuary Hall.”

SoA has not been a compiler-level feature in years. It has long since been a userspace module.

No, it was not, due to time constraints.

See guys, it's shit like this.

Phase was such a cool game! I spent a lot of time playing it in high school, both with my music library and with music my friends and I made. Only a couple years ago would I learn that Jon Blow was one of its programmers!

https://www.mobygames.com/game/30917/phase/credits/ipod-clas...

The paper was written in 2021, the skin-tone modifiers were added in 2015.

It shouldn't be a surprise that these would be the findings of post-hoc research done in 2021, long after skin-tone modifiers were made available and in common use, rather than research that was done before skin-tone modifiers were added to the standard, so as to justify the additional complexity and possible nth-order societal effects of adding them—which, as far as I can tell, does not exist.

Instead, someone somewhere made the call that giving up the universality of cartoon yellow emoji was worth “making some people ‘feel more represented’”, even despite the numerous other tradeoffs and nth-order effects (no reddish Native American tone, added social complexity for biracial users (“am I ‘black enough’ to use the darkest one, in a given arbitrary social context?”), and so on), which people conveniently ignore.

> The point is that white people (and yes East Asians too) are more readily able to identify with a yellow smiley face than black or other dark skinned people are.

A citation is needed for this extraordinary claim.

It's all downstream of yellow smiley faces (1950s)—raceless ideograms conveying a common emotion (happiness) that humans of all races happen to share—and I honestly have no idea how this seems to escape everyone today.

Honest question: do you see Caucasian features in the default yellow smiley face ideogram?

When Wal-Mart used it as their logo, was that an attempt to market toward white people specifically?

When a Japanese guy drew the first widely-used set of emoji, do you think he was doing so under the auspices of white supremacy (so strongly that he didn't even notice the “yellow = Asian” racist stereotype he was obviously participating in)?

The “LEGO (race) problem” was only a problem once LEGO began licensing IP (it was NBA first, not Star Wars, actually) and had to make minifigs to match real people. Before that, minifigs were perfectly raceless, able to abstractly represent whatever sort of characters that children could imagine—just like the yellow emojis.

Yellow minifigs aren't “white”—they're “LEGO people”.

Any other interpretation is post-hoc historical revisionism imagining past racial bias in domains where it was never present.

Yellow LEGO minifigs (1978) predate The Simpsons (1987). There is no evidence to my knowledge that the latter was directly influenced by the former, such that the “yellow minifigs = white” line of reasoning makes any sense at all.

Great to see people finally beginning to agree with this when I've been saying it for at least (according to comment history) eight years now.

It was always obvious that in a globally-connected Internet age, having universal, skintoneless glyphs that can be used to represent emotion and other shorthand (e.g. thumbs-up) was a decent idea, and that adding skin-tone modifiers was a bad idea:

- Five skin tones is insufficient to cover all possible present-day human use-cases

- Forcing users to make the decision between e.g. [thumbs up] and [thumbs up and also btw I'm white] is stupid (and possibly needlessly divisive)

- Skin-tone modifiers opened the door to all other sorts of modifiers

Now we're stuck with supporting all of this wholly unnecessary combinatorial complexity forever—awesome. What did we gain from this?

I don't know about anyone else, but for me at least, in 2025, it's hard to view a company not only making a bespoke typeface but going out of their way to write a press release about said bespoke typeface as anything other than a signal that said company's designers are high off their ass from huffing their own farts, to the point where users should be concerned about the longevity of said company.

Doubly so when said company's product is a website rather than an app such that users must redownload said typeface every time they clear their cache.

Quadruply so when said typeface is self-admittedly practically indistinguishable from Arial.

Feel free to assume whatever you'd like and ascribe whatever implicit outgroup labels you'd like as well.

I assure you there's quite the difference between a city (that even has “City” it its name!) of 80,000, and a town of 500. It's easy to see conflating the two as “high density population dweller ignorance” for anyone who has lived in or near all three (500, 80,000, 1M+).