Matt

what if novels were magic? @daylightco

Uploaded chapter 1 of The Odyssey for @daylightco in a new "magic ebook" format free here: mattsdevlog.itch.io/the-odyssey-da… Wanted to see what a classic story could feel like as a Daylight-native reading experience Had a lot of fun making the handdrawn illustration effects for this More soon

"there is something incredibly special about making things and putting things out there into the world that are truly representative of who you are and what you care about"

@blakeir @gamecraftpod @mitchlasky Awesome, loved the first two seasons

Grateful to be back for another season of @gamecraftpod with @mitchlasky. Mitch has a unique ability to see the present clearly. I walk away smarter every episode. We started this to explain the business of games. I remain stunned by both the reach and quality of our listeners

check this out: the daylight just become the premier paperlike monitor for your macbook 🔥 congrats on the launch @_welf!

much better

@blakeir I think a lot more of the industry is adopting AI than it seems. Was at a GDC roundtable last week where the moderator asked who had integrated AI into their workflows, and (after a few hesitant looks around the room) about 80% raised their hands.

games are commercial art built with software. i’m not sure there’s another software industry as resistant to AI as gaming.

@moonlake Moonlake Creator Cup

Creators, worldbuilders, game devs, Today we’re launching the first ever Moonlake Creator Cup. It can be a game, a simulation, a story or a tiny world of your own. Anything you imagine. We’ll award $30,000 across the most creative worlds, including $10,000 for first place. If you’ve been curious about Moonlake, this is a good excuse to build something. Repost “Moonlake Creator Cup” to join. Let’s see some magic ✨

@Dimillian why read books when you can write them

why play video games when you can build video games?

@filiphracek dude i love @majuular 's videos

New blogpost! filiph.net/text/bad-game-…

@FoundersPodcast @zachpogrob Curious if you've noticed any differences between founders of creative products (filmmakers, musicians, game designers) vs founder of utility products when it comes to this style of customer feedback loop.

@zachpogrob This:

If you're serious about your product as early stage founder You would not do podcasts You would not go to events You would not do anything Except work on your product Crazy how rare this actually is

New favorite way to write story scripts for Warden @_welf

Interesting. Counterpoint: The issue is that we call both Monopoly Go and Zelda games, but they are not the same. It's like calling both X and The Lord of the Rings literature because both involve reading. To me, this is similar to saying 100 years ago: The books of the future will be generated 140 characters at a time by people all around the world.

Future games will be made “for you” on the fly, generating gameplay and content based on your micro-engagement.

@thomasmahler Really cool. Do you think expansions will be paid? Or free (e.g. No Man's Sky)? Curious of what this means from a studio business perspective.

With No Rest for the Wicked, we're in an extremely interesting space right now after we shipped our Together update and are gearing up for 1.0. Let me ramble and share my thoughts for a minute: We never built Wicked as 'one game' that we finish and then replace with a sequel. We built it as a foundation, a platform. Over the past 5–10 years, we’ve created hundreds of thousands of assets, animations, systems, tools... we basically crafted an entire world. And I truly believe that the work we put into crafting Wicked that way will compound in value in the weeks, months and years to come. To me, this is a quite radically different development approach that could potentially even change how larger publishers look at game development. For Wicked, we’re going with an expansion model. Big campaign expansions will always be looming up ahead: More areas to explore, more story to unravel, more cinematics to experience, in short: More of your traditional ARPG fare. But in-between those expansions, me and some of my design team will always keep trying to push new ways of play into Wicked in order to potentially create that 'forever game' that many of us have always been dreaming of (I think in many ways the allure of that was what spawned the 'Metaverse' craze a few years back). My point is: For the past 30+ years, when a games studio finished a game, they either made a sequel while starting mostly from scratch or they started to develop an entirely new IP and usually had to rebuild everything. But I think we're finally at a point where it makes sense to break that old model: Because of the foundation we have, if we plan to fully commit to building a rogue-like that could rival Hades and other genre-references out there, we automatically have a huge leg-up by simply being able to already use our combat system and everything we've built so far. We don't have to reinvent the wheel or start from 0 and spend years building a base. Often times in development, the first couple of years are spent on pre-production where you figure out the world, the characters, the design, the systems... and usually then there's a mad rush when you fully enter production to pull all these pieces together in order to actually make the game that was dreamt up in these years prior. But given our foundation, we're now able to jump straight into the actual meat and potatoes of just crafting the game we want to make. That would only be possible if Wicked remains as one game that we'd keep expanding upon, which is currently still our intention. I've been frustrated in recent years because I think Survival Games are a bit stuck and so far I think Survival Games work more because of their addictive systemic loops instead of the perfection of all their core pillars. Case in point: I couldn't name a single survival game out there that has an insanely rich combat system. I'm sure devs had to spend most of the development time on other stuff and... rightly so. But... if we want to craft a survival game, we basically get the combat 'for free' since we already built it and spent years refining it. No publisher out there would fund a survival game where the pitch is 'This will be a survival game with combat as deep as Elden Ring!' - Everyone would understand that the costs would be horrendous and you'd question if the designer has properly done his homework. But if we do it based on the foundation we already built, suddenly that goal becomes entirely feasible. I recently discussed this idea with a senior person at Riot and got the same confirmation: If you'd want to build a new type of MOBA, one based on an animation-commit combat system instead of their old point and click foundation, you'd get booted out the room. Unfathomable, too costly and way too risky. And... they might be right. Unless you already have all the bits and pieces. Whenever I share this core idea with gamers, sometimes people draw comparisons to games like Spore. But the analogy isn't apt: Yes, Spore tried to be many games at once, but it was all built simultaneously, and then shipped as a packaged product. That doesn't work, it's too complex of a task and our brains aren't built that way. Wicked is the polar opposite: We started with one extremely solid core - our ARPG campaign. Now we expand outward, over time, in modules that share DNA. In many ways, this is close to what Will Wright was dreaming up in the 90's: Interconnected systems across different experiences. That idea was just too early back then and the infrastructure to deliver that didn't exist. But now it does. If we execute properly and don't do something really stupid, No Rest for the Wicked has the potential to become one of the first true 'forever games' and the 'endgame' experience would go far beyond what's traditionally seen in ARPGS: Not in the sense of endless grind. But in the sense that you don’t have to leave the game if you want something slightly different. You just pivot inside it. The ARPG campaign will always be the heart. And with 1.0, I think we'll deliver on that in spades. But when you finish a quest and feel like doing something else for a while, I believe the world should be your oyster. It's all incredibly ambitious and - frankly - quite insane. But so was building Wicked in the first place 😂🤣

@naval But does un-investable mean not worth doing as a bootstrapped solo founder?

Pure software is rapidly becoming un-investable.

@steveruizok @tldraw maybe @frontiertower ?

Where might one do a casual @tldraw event on short notice in San Francisco on the evening of Thursday March 5th?

@_welf @daylightco @claudeai @remarkablepaper @thelightphone This is awesome, can't wait to try it out

I’ve spent the last 10 years working on more humane technology I’ve reached the promised land now - Mac mirroring on @daylightco - internet blocked (negotiate with @claudeai to unlock) - @remarkablepaper for notes - pic taken on @thelightphone beeswax candles optional

Paul Graham coined a better term for vibe-coding in 2003. Sketching. "I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape ... If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching." @paulg

@jacksondahl @imagetextimage @mollyfmielke @DialecticPod Thanks man, great episode

@imagetextimage @mollyfmielke @DialecticPod Glassnote and @mattparavel builds all kinds of cool stuff

Tomorrow: @mollyfmielke on @DialecticPod ! Subscription links below.

@WaterMuseum_ this makes me feel better

If you can plan your entire video games story on paper ahead of time it shain’t even be a video game