dgbaumgart

Like, man, setting aside ethics, hypothetically trying to art direct a product built from generated art would be a pain in the ass - and tedious and unfulfilling to boot.

You'd have to warp the design around the limitations of the technology... which, yeah, possible. But limiting. (And not fun!)

All this: colton.dev/blog/curing-... -- but for art.

It's easy to generate an image that _looks_ like it's full of value and effort. But you lose in the coherence of details and concept, you lose if it's not based on common tropes, you lose trying to fit it into a coherent work or asset pipeline.

you've discovered the forefront of a new trend: treblemaxing

A screenshot of the game in dialog mode. Wormsy enters the Spirit House, which is full of smoke, then fails to suppress a sneeze. Then is about to meet a spooky figure.

The debugging console output behind the dialog with Wormsy being displayed. You can see all the conditions being tested, rules found, and scripts fired. This is basically all the logic used to construct the text in the other image. And *I* find this fascinating - there's a LOT of stuff required to make everything work nicely together.

Oh man, I did it!

Rules/scripts fire off all in the same frame unless there's any wait-for condition, in which case it waits for that condition to resolve, then picks up execution where it left off.

Total control over execution timing has revealed some bugs and jank - good! Time to clean it up...

For example, timing: via Starsector rules-style scripting loaded from file, I want to say "execute arbitrary scripts, then move camera to a position and when that's done, continue executing the rest of the scripts in the stack".

This sort of thing definitely requires a bit of Infrastructure.

So someone on Reddit (an ever impeccable source) advised that you can use C# events rather than Godot signals if you want to handle all that via code anyway (vs. the Godot editor interface) anyway, so.. I think I'll go ahead and do that.

I need to clean up a LOT to do with firing events and timing.

The main menu for my goblin game. The """real""" game title is blocked out for now. I should _also_ get a website up and etc etc. But: later. Anyway, there's a menu showing various basic options that absolutely don't work as well as a list of scenarios with fun little titles. One of them definitely works, one kinda works, and the others will certainly explode sooner or later. SO: I need to make this thing function more like a basic, working computer video game application and less like an experiment grown out of control.

Goblin Friday!

A couple days ago I sent a couple builds to a couple people for feedback.

Doing this made me realize how inadequate the basic "infrastructure" is - quit, menu state, pause/continue, turn state transitions. So I'm doing a pass through those.

Maybe even save/load, if we're lucky?

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

A scowly space pirate-looking man with a mean look, smirking. Curly hair, brown skin, gold earrings, guyliner, and fancy-lad coat. (I'm very sorry, I can't get the words "bisexual disaster" out of my head for some reason.)

Alright, it's coming together!
Here's the portrait for said character with Starsector-brand Wonky Space Lighting.

(He can't return if he's never... been?)
(Also: nope!)

(I know this is extremely vague. I'm just excited to have these pieces come together.)

I wrote so much very specific-feeling dialog for a minor character that I felt like I might as well make them a unique person - then realized I had a stray character half-developed (portrait even!) for a very unimplemented narrative arc that fits perfectly into the role.
... Perfect!

#starsector

Not quite *that* hardcore - we went to Lac Écho in Réserve faunique Papineau-Labelle. Gorgeous lake, and surprisingly good infrastructure in the campground. We skipped the first day due to thunderstorms so only did one night; going to have to get back there if we can.

You're not wrong.

(Was trying to clean up Select/Deselect logic and now I've got what looks like an infinite loop... somewhere. Um. Oops?)

A shot from, well, not July 2024 but October, but it makes a good comparison with the next image. Of note: Big unwieldy UI, lots of placeholder art, no map background.

A shot from June 2025 (which looks largely the same as present). Note: More streamlined UI, nice map background, better selection/direction indicators. And what you can't see is that there's ambient sound! Also the dialog view is smoother and has way more features. I just need to smash down all the rough edges a bit so some folks can play this "naturally".

Goblin Friday!

Missed a couple due to travel. Back to Goblin Mode!

Goal: get a build playable again to send to people I met and promised could play a build; they haven't seen progress in a year!

Step 1: make it so you can play the base scenario start to end w/o any weirdness or bugs.

... Now I say this with all the understanding that a game also proposes and upholds a certain relationship with the player with regard to choice, consequence, and meaning.

(Please be reassured that this instance falls on the correct side of that boundary.)

A gamedev thought:
Look, sometimes (oftentimes) (most times?) it's better to kinda force the player toward the one Fun dialog option you feel is really clicking rather than adding in a bunch of boring alternatives in the name of "fairness" or "choice".

(It's all an illusion anyway. Let me cook!)

Nice try! 😉

Fundamentally if your game contains text that you're comfortable filling with LLM slop you're making a bad game. Good design doesn't include text as empty filler the player isn't meant to read, engage with, or care about.

small games by tiny devs finding huge success by dropping all notions of expression and focusing on dopamine delivery has done some sort of heavy damage to whatever I believed in in the 2010s about game design

Anyway, I wrote a cranky email. I don't know enough French to really cause a fuss and get to the bottom of it, but I'll try.

I do feel strongly that everyone should be able to access nature, particularly the parks set aside for that purpose. Developers shouldn't be allowed to enclose public access.

So what it looks like is a bunch of vacation homes got built and they gated off the actual useful, safe road and are trying to send everyone else onto this dubious, unsafe trail that only quads and ATVs should be using.

How did this happen? How is that legal?

(I was pretty pissed at all of this.)

On Google Maps the dumb, crappy ATV trail is marked as Route 1. No car should drive on that, it is not safe.

We didn't take the trail. A guy show showed up even warned us that we needed 4 wheel drive, and he had popped a tire on it.

The image is what Google Maps looks like now - it implies that the main road, Route 1, takes this stupid, terrible trail around the private road.

No car should drive that.

The same map as before, but someone drew a red dotted line for this new, terrible access trail going around a section of the main route marked with black X's that has been turned into a private road.

OK, weird. The proper road that was obviously where Route 1 should go had sign for "Chemin Pekan" and led to vacation homes. We were being routed around on (frankly) a bullshit unsafe ATV trail covered in fist-sized rocks. A map was posted with this new "Route 1" drawn in with a dotted line.

A map showing the entrance to Route 1 in the reserve faunique at Entree Smallian.

I need to vent about this.

Last week we tried to drive to a campground in Réserve faunique de Papineau-Labelle. Route 1, a dirt/gravel road, which should get us there. At Lac Smallian, the road was blocked and claimed to be a private road. What looked like an ATV trail has a sign for "Route 1".

A short TODO list:
- distinguish music vs. ambient players
- do volume control!!
- implement crossfading
- completely redo track fade in/out
-- using crossfading
-- storing fade in/out times at actual start/stop of tracks
-- handle interrupting fade in/out with new fade call

Nothing is simple!

YouTube video by The Dungeon Synth Archives DIM - Compendium III (Dungeon Synth)

Goblin Friday!

Now digging into my music player to use some lovely environmental ambience from @mesotronik.bsky.social. Rapidly revealing that the code is truly half-baked & needs a *lot* of work. Oops!

In the meantime, my latest dungeon synth (-like?) to goblin to: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvLk...

Supra Memoriam, by Tsarewitch & Brooddark 6 track album

I truly adore @stianstark.bsky.social's theme track for the THREAT, but let me add a bit of musical accompaniment that helped me draw and write them:

cryochamber.bandcamp.com/album/supra-...

It's all incredible, and I'm particularly enamored with the track name "Industrial Witchcraft".

Re. last rebloop.
Reminds me of a conversation about bands started in garages (as example of grassroots cultural production) and how, structurally, every single possible step they would take toward success has been parasited by corporate profit-extraction mechanisms. There's no blood to live on.