Mike Rayhawk

But doctor, AI am Pagliacci

Mike Rayhawk, in his natural habitat: behind a computer in a LEGO office cubicle. He is drinking coffee and wearing a hat.

I still have that hat. I wear it to work sometimes

Korin, the girl to the left, went on to marry the guitarist from Tool, which I only found out later when she mentioned her husband taking over the @tool twitter account and I said "wow, the band must be pissed" and everyone looked at me like I'd grown a second head

A famous future director discovers the dangers of horned helmets

I can't in good conscience share almost any of these, but I like this one because it looks like he's taking a shot to the groin from my viking hat

I didn't start dating the host until a couple weeks later, I'm not sure why my clothes are already on her floor

Oh, it's worse than that. This was in Shockwave, we had two 512x512 texture sheets for the whole level.

That wasn't the issue - we could bake things just fine, but we couldn't load a baked texture into memory once we had it. There wasn't enough texture space.

Oh my god

Do you remember how I was talking about going to art school house parties with the director of KPDH back in the day

I just discovered a folder full of extremely compromising photos

I could do some extremely mild blackmail

Quake had John Carmack, running compiled code locally with some really wild assembly-level hyperoptimization.

We were running interpreted code live in-browser in 2006, which was handicap enough. But more importantly, I'm not John Carmack, because no one is John Carmack except John Carmack

I won't know until I get there!

A half dozen folks from our cohort already started on the firsts of February and March. Each time, we ask:

"Did they finally tell you what you're working on?"

Yes!

"Can you tell the rest of us who haven't started yet?"

No!

Moving to Denmark means cutting down on non-essentials and finally saying goodbye to this artifact from a bygone age.

A vintage pre-Dell Alienware Area 51 desktop tower monstrosity, from back in the days when that name meant something

Our next game is Verminsteel!

You're a bird with a broadsword, kicking thousands of fascists so hard they fly into the sun

PLEASE go wishlist it, it'll make me really happy and help me stop low-key panicking and stuff: store.steampowered.com/app/4352280/... #indiegame #indiedev #gamedev

Im still doing stuff like this, partially because Im an artist not a programmer, and partially because most light baking is *accurate* but not *expressive* and like, sometimes I just want to manually place some shadows around, accuracy be damned

The epic handshake meme. One arm is labelled 'RPG design', the other arm is labelled 'XML transformations' and the handshake is labelled with a screencap of a Git commit I did three years ago saying "This attribute is unnecessary and causing problems."

At last, my two spheres of expertise overlap.

Sometimes I miss the days where every basic detail required crazy bespoke wizardry and duct tape to pull off, rather than an endless parade of yep looks like Unreal Engine again

A low-poly concrete overpass with screwy shadows that aren't quite right

On the bright side, placing every shadow by hand meant we could skew them in cartoony ways that you couldn't get from a mathematically accurate pre-baked render.

A dramatically lit low-poly subway level that you would never suspect was built from a single extremely clever texture sheet

Reminiscing now about my first job as a game developer, when lighting was so expensive we couldn't even pre-bake it.

We made a single texture sheet with a lit side on top, a shadow side on the bottom, and a gradient in between, and placed all our shadows by hand with geometry cuts and UV mapping

For every convo we have about pre-rendered bgs it's kinda hard to impress upon folks who weren't there that a huge part of "the look" was doing the best we could do with bad lighting math and working around it with brute force and thoughtful craft.

Same deal with baked lighting environments.

Quick late night ramblings about mini wargaming: A problem I am having these days with larger scale (not skirmish!) wargaming is that it lacks diegetic currency and economy, which one would think isn't necessary until it shows up at the table in scenarios.

The talk to your friends app and the witness the horrors app being the same app is not great for the mental health is it

I visitored away some especially choice LEGO Elves and Lord of the Rings sets today, but if I'd wanted to keep them then I should have packed them already. It's a race

My new strategy is, when we get a visitor, to force them to take as much LEGO as they can fit in their luggage

It's harder to get past that "oh no, I couldn't possibly" than I would have expected

When everyone moved out, the more remote sections of the old house fell into disuse, and LEGO accumulated in the shadows

A back hallway lined with piles of even more boxes of LEGO

My recycling bins are already full of LEGO boxes and I've barely started

Still sorting. Every time I think I've found all the LEGO, I find more LEGO

If an irresistible force meets an immovable object:

The collision converts infinite potential energy into infinite kinetic energy, creating a spacetime curvature singularity.

Like a black hole, time dilates to the point that the event never actually occurs in our universe.

Problem solved!

Was "Epstein class" a bridge too far

The Toxic Fan Cycle.

- What is this?
- I like this.
- I LOVE this!
- I OWN THIS.
- I... don't own this???
- ...I hate this.
- I WILL DESTROY THIS.

A 3d render of the Egg Inc farm, built in LEGO at micro scale.

Many many baggies of 2,311 LEGO pieces laid out in the sun, on a table.

My day job is working on artwork for the mobile game Egg Inc.

A fan of the game made this LEGO set of the Egg Inc farm, in Studio.

I just unpacked all the pieces to make it irl:

every moment happens once, just floating by wether we notice it or not. here and gone. it is up to us to grab these little slivers of time and see them and give them a nod. what a blessing it is to be given this chance. remember to take it when you can

The common thinking for PBTA games is that rolling a 10+ on a move is a success, 7-9 is a partial success, and 6- is a miss.

And I don’t think that’s generally wrong, but while reading moves from the Bakers, it’s clear that “success” doesn’t have to mean, “the player gets what they want.” (1/6)

A news alert from WTNH about the 2026 blizzard causing power outages in Connecticut

He's been retired from the game industry for years, but my instant knee-jerk response is still "goddammit Bobby Kotick"