Oliver Withington

One of the sweetest moments of the march: a bunch of shop floor staff at a fancy boutique suddenly having a flash of inspiration and rushing to grab plain shirts to make a trans flag at the window.

Oh shit dude you're here?! Prepare to be hunted

M is one of the most exciting researchers in the game. Whatever they are cooking up will 100% be cool as heck and you should help them make it

Save 20% on The Horror at Highrook on Steam The Horror at Highrook is an occult card crafting narrative RPG. Explore a haunted mansion with your team of investigators, summon dark entities, craft powerful protections, uncover the fate of the mi...

Well would you believe it. The Horror At Highrook is ON SALE!!!
store.steampowered.com/app/2836860/... So if you have been waiting to see what those 230+ very positive reviews are all about maybe now is the time to check it out! 20% off!

glad to see people really liked this one! unfortunately it seems like youtube doesn't really know where to send it so impressions are unusually low, so any shares are appreciated

These BioShock beta screens are well worth a look, if just for the 'placeholder atrocity'.

www.reddit.com/r/Bioshock/c...

Failing to Escape the Triumphal Procession of Video Games Have you read Hurricane Season by Brit Bennett? Or perhaps, Nightshade Market by Min Jin Lee? Actually, those are trick questions- I know you haven’t read either because neither of these novels exi…

🏃New blog post!🏃

This time I'm writing about the "triumphal procession" of video games - what gets included in the video game canon? And what makes a video game worthy of study, or even just being remembered?

florencesmithnicholls.com/2025/05/23/f...

The logo for Yarn Spinner - a script of speech bubbles and syntax icons being knitted by a pair of knitting needles - is shown with styled text announcing "Version 3 out now". A small url at the bottom directs the reader to visit yarn spinner dot dev slash V three.

🎉 YARN SPINNER 3 IS OUT NOW 🎉
for Unity, Godot, VSCode + try.yarnspinner.dev

Including:
- Storylets, enums, simple "run this bit only once" syntax
- Better variables, easier-to-customise views
- Bugfixes + QoL improvements galore
- All-new docs + guides

Check it out at yarnspinner.dev/v3 💚

Space is not a wall: toward a less architectural level design Maybe video game level design theory needs less focus on architecture? And maybe I'm part of the problem? My bad.

new blog post: turned my gdc 2025 level design theory talk into a blog post www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2025/05/spac...

Any time anyone points out a pun I'd never spotted it makes me paranoid for ages. Like I'm surrounded by an invisible alien threat who's goal is to make me feel foolish when I least expect it

How Victorian London Was Brought To Life In Assassin's Creed Syndicate Echoes of History · Episode

Absolutely delighted that the first episode of the podcast I’ve been making with Ubisoft and HistoryHit is now out wherever you get your podcasts!

We discuss creating Victorian London in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, featuring an interview with the lead writer ✍️

open.spotify.com/episode/0kTv...

Pictures of my attendee badges from FDG 2023 2024 and 2025

The collection grows

Selfie of me on the Heldenplatz in Vienna

Me at the FDG banquet dinner

Me outside FDG 2025 with Victoire Herve

Group photo of FDG attendees

#FDG2025 was an absolute blast! 3rd year attending, 3rd year of it being the highlight of my PhD. Inspiring talks, cool new projects and the most welcoming and exciting community I've encountered.

To all who attended and especially the organisers, sending all of my love. Cannot wait for FDG2026!

BBC Sound Effects BBC Sound Effects

You can find the impressive (and free) BBC sound effects archive here: sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk

It's been such a highlight of my PhD! Going to try and find an excuse to go back every year for as long as I can. Hope you get an excuse to go in 2026!

Day 2 #fdg kicking off! My favorite event in the academic calendar.

I really try and finish games before moving onto new ones, but the Blue Prince FOMO I'm getting from all of y'all is getting to be too much to bear

I just found out about this periodic table of game mechanics that is fun to experiment with for brainstorming and game jams.

determined-clams.static.domains/chipped

#gamejam #brainstorm #gamedev #indiedev

A really awful 3D mesh of a 2 ended arrow with strange growths on one side. Produced by generative ai of some kind

Buddy of mine is trying to use genAI to make assets for his game. Sent me a mesh he'd generated for a basic targeting arrow and asked if I could give it a quick tidy up in Blender.

Opened it up and...lol

Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen

New Game: Mike Cook Presents SQORP! A Digital Puzzle Game

It's a quick little game about laying tiles in a grid, inspired by a mathematical puzzle.

Play free on itch, in the browser: illomens.itch.io/sqorp #pico8

Anonymous Coward What game had an overall bigger negative impact on singleplayer game design because people took the wrong lessons from it: Half-Life 2 or Dark Souls? half life 2 and isn't close. the fully first person yet paradoxically cinematic fps spectacle campaign produced a few bangers but also a lot of absolute trash in the 360 era, as it is ultimately a pretty boring formal structure, emphasising budget above all. call of duty's single player doesn't have THAT much better "core gameplay" than i dunno. homeland or whatever. but it has better pacing, more bespoke assets, more exciting setpieces. not that if you have tons of money your game will automatically be good, but it is very hard to make a game that can compete in the space without tons of money, and the history of the genre bore it out. i don't think it's a coincidence that modern indie shooters take so much more influence from pre half-life boomer shooter design, when budgets and team sizes were so much smaller. meanwhile i think dark souls has pretty inarguably had an incredibly positive impact on singleplayer game design. i know people are bored of the soulslike formula and i sympathise because it's certainly oversaturated, but also, it got that way because it's really good. and not just really good but really simple too. the core rules of the genre have interesting decisions built into them. enemies respawn at checkpoints so you're encouraged to push on. but you have limited health so you're incentivised to be cautious. it's just a more rich and more adaptable formula across all scopes of production, one that emphasises intentional level design and moment to moment decision making over spectacle and setpieces. but obviously still has room for both in boss fights especially. so yeah. i'm generally pro dark souls and i think while its initial waves of clones focused too much on surface level elements of slow combat and brutal difficulty, at this point the elements that make the formula are well un…

What game had an overall bigger negative impact on singleplayer game design because people took the wrong lessons from it: Half-Life 2 or Dark Souls? — neospring.org/+r/168016012...

‘An overwhelmingly negative and demoralizing force’: what it’s like working for a company that’s forcing AI on its developers

aftermath.site/ai-video-game-...

Screenshot of planescape torment - highlighting that it lets you annotate your dialogue choices with your intent. Here you can pick between two identical dialogues, one highlighted as a 'Vow' and the other as a 'Lie'

After 2+ decades of it being hyped up I've finally been playing Planescape: Torment and fair play, its amazing. I especially love how it lets you add your intent to dialogue choices. Feels so cool every time and i'm shocked I've not seen that ripped off more in other RPGs

Tracks in Snow (In Development Version) by Nic June A post-apocalyptic roadtrip

It's trans day of visibility so I'm going to yell more about all the games I make outside of my day job

My main project is a lesbian post apocalyptic road trip visual novel that I started as a way to make a visual novel in an engineering department (also Rika is trans <3)

under a building held up by concrete columns

a side view looking up at a brutalist building with bars on each window

looking up at a brutalist concrete building, the varying windows each have bars on them

the top of one of the buildings, with overlapping geometry and windows with bars on them

brutalist bloki
a thread with an accumulation of screenshots from all the modeling i've been doing for my procedural city
. . giant abandoned structures . .
#gamedev

Absolutely delighted to be writing for Amberspire!!

When Nic approached me I jumped at the opportunity to work on such a brilliant project and with a ridiculously talented team 💫

So excited for people to see what we’re creating… I think it’s really special

Step aside Chekhov's gun. There's a new narrative principle in town

I'm pretty easy to please with films, but if your first act introduces a door basically made out of knives and then that door fails to make an appearance in act 2 or 3 i'm going to be sad

Finally watched Alien Romulus on the flight home and it was...fine. But introducing a door that looks like this and at no point having it chop anyone or anything in half is an Art Crime.