Akhil Dakinedi

As a user, I want to be sternly threatened with a warning

Anything you mark with your spyglass gets a generic tag like "Mysterious Pagoda" until you actually go there and figure out what the name of the place is, at which point it updates. Such a great way to encourage active discovery & exploration. Truly hats off to Isaburo the Cartographer, the real MVP

The traveler's maps are also such a fun minigame where you have to place the landmark from geographical clues. It requires just enough effort to try and figure out where something fits is so that you actually remember that there's something around that area even if you're not actively looking for it

I'm so impressed with #GhostOfYotei and its dedication to not having a quest tracker, journal or any kind of log at all. They went all-in on the fully immersive map as the place to track everything: quests, bounties, shrines, wolf/fox dens, inns, NPCs, landmarks etc. It works so bloody well 👏

Decentralizing quality Why moving judgment to the edges wins in the long run

New essay! What the heck is "quality", anyway? And how can we intentionally and meaningfully create it in our work?

matthewstrom.com/writing/dece...

Got the first clear in #Hades2 after 28 runs! With the Sister Blades at that...the weapon I was struggling to use the most. Aspect of Pan made it suit my playstyle a lot more. Onwards to repeatedly doing this a hundred more times ✌️

It’s always hilarious to me when companies define a chunk of their audience as “price-sensitive”…like come on that literally encompasses 99% of the world population right now

I often find myself longing for the general vibe of the Alan Wake universe. One moment I’m grinding coffee beans and my mind is going “Man imagine sipping this while driving around Cauldron Lake heading towards Coffee World on a misty morning, that’s the stuff”

How To Build A Resilient Design Team | Figma Blog How do you build a team that’s resilient to change, no matter what’s around the corner?

New on the @figma.com blog – I wrote about building resilient design teams, especially in times of constant macro change and instability.

Sharing some tips here around team health and culture, craft, scaling with intention…and having fun together while you’re at it:

www.figma.com/blog/how-to-...

The product design talent crisis Why we should invest in the next generation of product designers

100% accurate — I often feel like I can’t give junior designers valuable career advice because of exactly this problem matthewstrom.com/writing/prod...

Amazon seriously needs some kind of tier-system in its search results. Usually the cheapest brands of an item have the most number of reviews and the more expensive/premium brands have very few because not enough people purchased them. Super hard to get a sense of quality for the pricier options

[Pt. 2/2] Vibe coding my way to the App Store Part 2/2 of deep-dive case study on how I prototyped, built, and shipped Poker Slam to the iOS App Store using Cursor.

Part 2: medium.com/@a_kill_/pt-...

[Pt. 1/2] Vibe coding my way to the App Store Part 1/2 of deep-dive case study on how I prototyped, built, and shipped Poker Slam to the iOS App Store using Cursor.

Extra long special feature two-part blog post documenting how I built this is now live: medium.com/@a_kill_/pt-...

There's so many hidden mechanics and interactions I was unaware of. Looking forward to playing it again with dev commentary on to dive deeper into all the design decisions on this one! What a high watermark for VR 👏

Having played through several other games on PSVR2, I still feel like this is king. The ambition and technical wizardry is just completely unmatched by anything else out there right now. Despite all the praise it has received, it still feels underrated!

7. Story: The tie-in to Half Life 2: Episode Two and the G-Man are amazing and totally unexpected for a game like this

8. Jeff: Need I say more? Easily the most memorable level in the entire game

4. Physics simulation: Fluid inside bottles, markers on glass, it all behaves exactly how you'd expect and feels so intuitive

5. Character models: Lifelike animation, highly detailed facial models and expressions

6. Environments: Unbelievably detailed and varied environments, esp. the alien ones

1. Gravity gloves: absolutely satisfying core gameplay mechanic that never gets old

2. Weapons: Small selection of 3 weapons with upgradeable mods that felt like they were custom-made for VR

3. Interactivity: Everything can be picked up and used as a weapon, a distraction, or a tool

Finally played through Half Life Alyx in VR after 5 years of the game having been out. This is by far the most immersive and incredible gaming experience I've ever had, there's so many things about it that just blow the competition so far out of the water!

Thanksss Gui! I also spent several hours attempting to add Metal shader effects to the cards which looked even cooler but it kept crashing lol, going to give it another go in an update soon

‎Poker Slam ‎Create classic poker hands like pairs, flushes, and straights by connecting adjacent cards on a dynamic 5x5 grid. The rarer the hand, the bigger the score — so plan carefully, think ahead, and maximi...

Shipped a MVP / prototype of my first app (fully built with Cursor), check it out if you’re on iOS: apps.apple.com/us/app/poker...

I've learned way more Swift by debugging AI code output than I have through years of trying to hack stuff in XCode manually. There's something way more approachable about focusing on specific errors in code and learning how to fix it than trying to write everything from scratch yourself.

The Future Favors the Curious » Mike Industries If you’re a designer in the market for a job right now, you probably feel behind the AI wave already, and you’re wondering if the skills you’ve honed in your career are even useful anymore. One of the...

Wrote a little piece about how AI is changing the job market for designers. Something similar happened in 1995, and there is a clear way through it if you stay curious. mikeindustries.com/blog/archive...

Petition to communicate the weight of all large vehicles in units of skateboarding rhinos. Melbourne has it figured out

love it when i ask a PM what problem we're solving with this work and they respond with "we need to increase RPQA by 10% bc LMV is trending negative so changing the FFCT threshold by 5% will help us increase KMGT/$ by 22.5 bps"

Making a weather app that tells you the weather in haikus and Cursor has made the tasteful branded choice to convert every error message into a cryptic haiku as well. I am now vibe debugging.

Designing your slide deck is such an underrated skillset. Nailing the art of storytelling and having a clear narrative with crisp slides can help you sell even the most mediocre design work

Engineer: "Hey, can you get me a design spec for this? :)"

Me: "Sure, here you go! :D"

Engineer: "Oh this is too hard to build :/"

Me: "..."

FFVII Rebirth is truly the wildest game, you’ll walk into a new area and your objectives are:

• Defeat 3 players in this strategy card game
• Win a battle against this enemy without turning into a frog
• Perform this dance routine flawlessly with an A rank
• Play the piano

This page is under construction - localghost If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website.

This page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website.

h/t @ethanmarcotte.com