Séamus Ó Buadhacháin

For your reassurance, here's the Fallen London AI Transparency Statement and the portion of the Steam page which states that we're making Mandrake by hand.

We don't use generative AI. <3

A beautiful woodland on a sunny day in our game Mandrake, and some social media person has put a big thing on top that says THANK YOU FOR 100,000 WISHLISTS.

Mandrake has just passed 100,000 wishlists. That feels significant.

Recently we also passed 100,000 lines of code.

What could it mean?

(Thank you!)

A round, light brown tablet made of clay with three lines of cuneiform scripts. Two rulings, or traced straight lines, enclose the writing. The photo also shows the sides of the tablet, including a few damaged parts.

May as well dive right in.

Did you know that dogs in ancient Mesopotamia also refused to drop the ball?

According to a Sumerian proverb, “The dog understands ‘Take it!’ It does not understand ‘Put it down!’”

Source: cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/34...

A new website about PC games, from me, @brendyc.bsky.social and @jonhicks.com.

Reader-supported, which means no ads, no guff, and lots of games blogging about delightful things to play. If you liked our work on RPS, we think you'll like @jank.cool.

That's a good-looking deck. The very best of luck with the pitch!

Well, I'd like to see ol' Inkle release a banger THIS time!
* Inkle effortlessly release a banger
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

Have you seen... this before? 🤘

ah, another day of not changing the language settings on this keyboard and getting the é for my own name by googling beyoncé

Yes; ha ha ha; yes.

2026 beginning of the year cleaning up files on my PC and found this one a friend send me when working on some code.

Every developer can relate.

#solodev #indiedev #development

Bill Watterson could do Sin City but Frank Miller could not do Calvin and Hobbes

Manchester, 31 Dec 2015. Chaos in the streets.

Happy tenth anniversary to photographer Joel Goodman’s classic image which by rights should be hanging in the Louvre.

Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982)

fun Weird West dev anecdote: there was a decal on a gun shop that said "riffles" instead of "rifles", i pointed it out in the slack and this was the fix that came through and shipped

Essentially, I think that LLM-generated dialogue only makes sense if you believe that the product of writing is words.

But the product of writing isn't words, any more than the product of justice is prisoners, or the product of love is weddings. The product of writing is meaning.

me if I do the thing now: ok that's over

me if I think about it every day but put off doing the thing for 6 months, then finally do it: I am queen of this realm and deserve every comfort it can offer me, bestow upon me only praise and blessings

A pigeon goes to the doctor. "Doctor, I'm stressed out. Life seems harsh and cruel. I'm honking like a muppet."

Doctor says [etc.]

a man in a suit is saying for that reason i 'm out . ALT: a man in a suit is saying for that reason i 'm out .

there's two ways work out if a new acquaintance is a rotter:
- did they ignore a cat on the street that clearly wanted a pet
- did they ship a unity asset with a static class called MathUtils in the root namespace

Yarn Spinner continues to look more and more interesting with every release. Built-in fallthrough support at choice points is a really exciting feature.

A solemn, olive-skinned woman with a sweeping white robe holds a staff and gazes into the distance. The background is lush green vegetation. Text reads: Preposterously Luscious.

We can only describe our character designs as preposterously luscious!

Here's a detailed look at how we created the neighbours you'll be meeting in our upcoming game, Mandrake.

#indiedev #indiegames (Please do share!)

I played through Duskpunk over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it; strongly recommended to my fellow Fallen London heads.

This is the kind of "poker plus deck-building" genius that feels obvious in retrospect; is he hiring?

Hey, I bet you didn't hear that Zork 1, 2, and 3 were open-sourced today!

…Oh, you have heard. Yeah. Way ahead of me. :)

Here's my comments, and some details that you might not have seen.

blog.zarfhome.com/2025/11/zork...

YouTube video by Develop:Brighton Testing Branching Narrative at Scale: Lessons from Mask of the Rose | Develop:Brighton 2024

At Develop 2024 I gave a talk on how we tested the narrative logic in Mask of the Rose, now up on YouTube. If you're interested in testing branching narratives with millions of possible states, but you also love dumb jokes delivered in a monotone, then hold onto your hat: youtu.be/7nxGsml1DUY?...

Tag yourself in this 1800s list of supernatural entities of the British isles

This is correct!

The Womble and The Clanger in the style of The Omen and The Exorcist

🧵I've posted them before, but here's my thread of horror/kids' TV double-bill cinema posters. Happy Halloween...
#halloween #cinema #graphicdesign #poster

The original Far Side Cow Tools Cartoon by Gary Larson. A cow stands on its hind legs behind a table, staring blankly at the viewer from behind its heavy brow ridge. On the table are four crudely made tools: a lump, a lump with an offset crooked handle, a long stick with hooked prongs at the end, and a crude handsaw with irregular teeth. In the background a barn sits on a hill. Caption reads, "Cow tools."

43 years ago today, readers the world over opened their newspapers and gazed upon cow tools for the first time. happy birthday cow tools. you look great.

NUTS in a list of horror games on steam that are all black and darkj, while nuts is deep purple.

a metal band poster that is all black and white except party cannon which is in the toys r us bubbly color font

NUTS is the party cannon of the steam halloween thing lol