Hauke Thiessen

Ritual of Raven is OUT NOW! 🔮✨🌱

🌿Grow a magical herb garden & automate your farming
💌Befriend a cute bunch of weirdos
💫Perform powerful rituals & find the portal keepers

10% launch discount 💸

RTs greatly appreciated! 💜
#indiedev #indiegame

I love how optimizing game performance oscillates between replacing the entire second half of the level with a screenshot and digging through compiled shader code to replace divisions with bit shifts.
Both optimizations are done at the same time and in the same project, and both have their place.

🔮 5 MORE DAYS until Ritual of Raven is out! 🔮

Prepping the tavern & tuning instruments…
█████▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ 29%

#indiedev #indiegame

Perfect, I just finished working on an AI version of myself that can pretend to listen to multiple podcasts simultaneously.

That's the stupidest sentence I've read in a while.

Profiling without Source code – how I diagnosed Trackmania stuttering A very common side effect of working as a programmer is the constant frustration of not having source code access to all the software you use. Bugs, problems or missing features in your own work ca…

My new blog post is there, and it's a bit different from usual: Fixing stutters in your own code is hard enough, but this time I try to fix performance issues in a closed-source game. No source code or debug symbols, but a lot of guesswork. larstofus.com/2025/07/27/p...
#gamedev
#Trackmania

UI Textures – Worth Optimizing? A few days ago, I gave a talk at the German Dev Days about reducing the size of textures in memory and on disk. Some parts of the presentation were based on my articles on Mip Flooding and Game Sizes,...

Wrote a new blog post about making UI textures use less memory: haukethiessen.com/ui-textures-...
It's an expanded version of what was originally only one section of my talk at the German Dev Days.
#gamedev #techart

This isn't immigration control, it's genocide.

Laura Loomer‘s tweet: Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.

The entire Latino population in the U.S. is 65 million. She means all of us.

SetMaxTouchpadSensitivity function - Win32 apps Sets the touchpad sensitivity to max for the calling process.

TIL that Windows disables the touchpad while you're typing. Ofc, this causes issues in most games.
Thankfully, there's a way to disable that behavior:
learn.microsoft.com/en-us/window...
(If you're using Unreal, you don't need to do that yourself, because it was included in UE 5.6)
#gamedev

Found a bug in Unreal's static mesh editor: When converting box colliders to convex ones, the resulting colliders don't have the 'Collision Generated' flag and will be deleted upon the next reimport.
Here's my pull request to fix that (only one line🎉):
github.com/EpicGames/Un...
#gamedev

Angesichts der Bilder von DeSantis, der stolz vor den Käfigen in seinem neuen Gefangenenlager im Sumpf posiert, sollte man sich daran erinnern, dass Dorothee Bär, die sich so supi für Games einsetzt, sich mit ihm getroffen hat und ihn ganz toll findet.

I worked on RuneScape 2005-2014. I haven't thought about it much since then, but it occasionally pops up in my feed and seeing it usually it makes me happy and nostalgic.

But this makes me really angry. Cowardly and disgusting.

I also wrote a new article about adding thumbnails and using Windows Search to find #gamedev assets. This may sound trivial, but it really helps with common frustrations.
haukethiessen.com/how-to-find-...

Developing Games for Devices with Batteries As someone who travels by train frequently, the best purchase I made in 2024 was a Steam Deck for playing games on the go. Being able to play PC games whenever I want still feels like a luxury to me b...

After being frustrated with Artstation's blogging options for way too long, I finally moved to WordPress🎉:
haukethiessen.com
All posts so far did survive the move. I'm still getting used to the newfound freedom and polishing the new site, so please let me know about any rough spots. #gamedev

Is it just me or is does the pirate on the cover of Sid Meier's Pirates! look like a slightly painted-over Patrick Swayze?

I just realized that A Short Hike is the only game (that I know of) where the length of the soundtrack matches the average playtime.

In software development, there should be a term for when you have some actual work to do, but instead you go over your existing code to find ways to optimize it further, convincing yourself that you're being productive.
Not 100% sure about the name yet:
procrasmization?
opticrastination?
#gamedev

Latest fashion upgrade 📍

Comparison of the install size of various engine components in 5.5 vs 5.6

This is a pleasant surprise, Epic actually worked on reducing the Unreal's disk size. The core components are around 9 GB smaller and the templates were even shrunk down from 3.7 to 0.8 GB 🥳

....oh and the new MetaHuman stuff added another 5 GB + 12 GB more debug symbols 🙃
Well, it's something

💫Release Date Announcement💫

Surreal to think that the game we started working on 4 years ago is now inching closer to the finish line! 😮

🔮Ritual of Raven launches August 7th, 2025! 🔮

#indiedev #cozygames #indiegames
Part of The MIX Summer Game Showcase @themix.bsky.social‬ 🌴

Now I'm wondering what the other options in that menu are. Like, are there any options in there that I can safely click by accident, without anything happening?

At least the 'Erase Disk...' option opens up a dialog box instead of immediately causing havoc, so someone put some thought into this.

After a longer break I finally started working on my MipExplorer tool again. For now, I only submitted a list displaying the information densities of the mip maps, but the backlog is growing again...😅
github.com/HaukeThiesse...
#gamedev

System Shock on the VFX-1 The main reason I got the VFX-1 was to play System Shock on it. It is one of only a small handful of games which supports stereo 3D on the hardware in addition to the head tracking. This only works…

Today I learned that the original System Shock had a VR mode:
www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/system-shock...
Sadly, there's no video footage of it. It may exist, but you can't find it anymore because the remake also has a VR mode, and that makes it impossible to find the original☹️
#gamedev

Everyone talks about how game budgets keep increasing and how modern games are much more sophisticated than the old stuff, but basic standards like localizing them so that people can enjoy (or even understand) them in their native language? Apparently there's no budget left for that.

Number of voiced languages in games vs their remakes/remasters:
Oblivion:
2006: 5
2025: 1

Riven:
1997: 8
2024: 1

System Shock:
1994: 3
2024: 1
Games are becoming an English-only club and I don't think that's a good thing in the long run.
#gamedev

YouTube video by PAX Folding Ideas Presents: Call of Duty: Ghosts – Power Paranoia and Orbital Tungsten Rods | PAX E

I almost missed the latest Folding Ideas video, because it's a recording of a presentation at the last PAX and not uploaded on the Folding Ideas Youtube channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSkb...
Even though it's live and not edited as the usual essays, it's funny and insightful as always.

If I remember correctly, the bug didn't happen in 4.27 anymore, I guess it was re-introduced in 5.5🤔

I blogged about how disabling occlusion queries in Unreal 5.5 completely breaks anything that depends on UPrimitiveComponent's GetLastRenderTime(), including Skeletal Animation. https://www.stevestreeting.com/2025/05/22/ue-5.5-skeletal-animation-/-lastrendertime-bug/ #unrealengine