What makes old franchises live or die? I wrote about my personal experiences with Tribes, Marble Blast/Marble It Up, Blockland, and Zap - all games with 20+ year followings.

More gems.

I needed to generate test data for a real estate project, and ended up with some delightfully unhinged listings.

Fascinating to see multiple LLMs converging on the same answer for a fairly complex question. Although notice that it's only specifying the mantissa not the exponent...

Fun fact, at GarageGames, we used our engine to build a chibi tank battle game and a gem collecting marble game... later Unity came out with a gem collecting marble game ( https://t.co/d3XNKupBCa) and a chibi tank battle game (remake - https://t.co/8hrNtCrCbH)?

LLMs are getting better every month, so I still think there could be a breakthrough which changes everything. But the odds are gradually decreasing - the curve on the current generation is visibly leveling out.

Each step up that chain is a big win, but none have obviated the need for good teams, or arguably even reduced team size. Will agentic coding achieve a 10x reduction in staff? MSFT employee count has grown every year for the past decade.

"[LLMs] will only be truly impressive in the hands of exceptional software engineers" - if they require an incredibly talented user, how are LLMs different than a high friction text editor? That same user could use toggle switches... punch cards... assembly... (cont.)

To expand, there will be a wave of deliveries from nvidia to data centers that will not have the demand to use them. Frontline use will be on local devices, and data centers will be for bulk usage or very high end models.

The trend in GenAI over the next few years will be less with more. Apple has a big incentive to make their deployed hardware more effective, thus research like https://t.co/ufcdMhVHEC There will be a lot of underutilized AI data centers because of this.

I've been keeping an eye on Desolus for a lot of years now - wishlist it! Congrats, @DesolusDev !

Am I just using it wrong?

My assumption based on other experiences is that if I was doing a boring React app it would do much better, but this seems excessively bad given the buzz it has.

In Codex, I keep getting > 5 minute processing times for tasks like "make the letters for this dialog fade in one at a time like a typewriter" in an HTML5/Pixi.js project that codex made itself from scratch. Is codex good?

Oh no, they're adding IDisposable to JavaScript. :(

Dependencies are a sucker’s game. (The second half of JBs essay here talks about this.)

I posted my sequels article to /r/MarbleItUp and @AdrianWhitt posted a writeup about the journey from Marble Blast to MIU. I'm biased but really enjoyed reading it: https://t.co/yU7vz8apMk Good thoughts on design decisions and some "how it got there" anecdotes.

Bottom line: hubris, distraction, and obsession kill franchises; self-awareness, focus, and pragmatism give them life. But give it a read!

Torque had a bug for maybe ten years where you could delete "this" out from under the scripting language stack and it would badly break. Turns out nobody ever did that... At least not for ten years!

GTA:SA has a bug where some physics values can come from uninit'ed stack. In my experience large game codebases surface a "why did this ever work" bug about once a year. Too bad they only fixed it in one lineage of the game.