Daniel Cook

We're excited to announce that applications are open for the Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant 2025 🎉

The grant will award $15,000 to five thinky puzzle game developers from all over the world, and a year's mentorship with genre veterans.

Deadline: September 28th
More info 👇
grants.draknek.org

My holy cup of coffee has a halo

😈 Announcing Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists, a procedural narrative RPG by A Sharp @radiofreelunch.bsky.social and published by us!

▶ Wishlist the game now on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3794210/...

I am so looking forward to this.

live and drink 🕹️🍄

Digging through the rubble, they came across the remains of an old utility robot.

The foreman grimaces, "This model? When it was working, I guess it was useful."

My wife did the Japanese translation of Kentucky Route Zero. Like translating literature. These sort of projects are rare.

My standing desk has two settings:
- Seated typing height
- Soup eating height

2x2 matrix of useful / not useful vs true / not true

An exercise for the reader

Hot take but this was the best button layout design and regressing back to the SNES layout post-gamecube sucks actually

There's a big festival every year to celebrate that when everyone was fighting a couple hundred years ago, the two cross border towns helped one another stay fed during the hard winter.

Growing up on the border of Canada, you only needed an ID to get across the border. 10 seconds, if that. Families would live on one side of the river and work on the other; no big deal. My middle school teacher was a guard in the summers and we'd cross the border just to say hi.

I'm never going to click on your Calendly link

Love it. Keep your team small, ownership close and this feeling can continue for years!

You can't compete with me. I want you to win too.

✨I hope we all make it ✨

Shipping stories, chapter 11
"We want this feature!"
"Sure, here's what we can squeeze in with what's available. We have no time, no engineers, and fixed capabilities."
"But that's not the perfect solution to this edge case. So it is all wrong."
"Okay. Given the constraints, what is your proposal?"

itch is close!

Mobile: Bred for maximum efficiency at extracting revenue and time in order to serve their ad network masters.

Indie: Free range developers kept in a large pen that replicates an entrepreneurial experience.

AAA: Game developers bred for high-end visuals that sell 3D hardware and consoles

"The domestication of previously wild game developers by third parties and middleman" Discuss.

Ain't nobody quoting Fitts' Law like they used to.

"Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, plausible—and wrong."

Every zeitgeist matures into an old ghost. Haunting the nights of fading stars

(If anyone is curious we invest about ~5X as much in AI each year as it would cost to fix world hunger.)

Riker googles: "How much would it cost to end world hunger?
"Okay, how much do we invest in AI?"

Riker is lost in thought.

Another 40+% do not make obvious causal inferences on their own. It just doesn't occur to them to be curious about cause and effect.

Only 20+% build causal mental models on their own based off the evidence they've gathered by interacting with a system.

Study sheds light on why some people keep self-sabotaging “Some people just don’t learn from experience; they fail to realize their own behavior is causing the problem.”…

When you are making your very clever game, realize that upwards of 27% of players do not rationally process basic cause and effect. Even when deliberately informed. arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Some months are like The Long Rain by Ray Bradbury.

"It is issue A"
"It is issue B! I will fight you."
"Um, it is really A, B, C, D and E. Everywhere. All at once."