Slop is without a doubt everywhere. Be it in restaurant’s menus, music playlists, or online game storefronts, it is now impossible to escape it. Yet, I’ve never met anyone who was actually looking forward to consuming that. No matter how hard it’s shoved down our throats, the human longing to connect with other people through art still remains. Raymond Kotewicz They will not let you filter A simple solution would be to have slop filters. Automatically label AI-generated trash, and let users hide it if they don’t want to see it. So far, I don’t think any of the major internet platforms has implemented this. The common excuse for why they don’t let you easily filter out slop is that it would be technically too difficult. Let me be clear with everyone here: this is complete bullshit. We’re talking about companies that can hire some of the most talented engineers in the world. I don’t think anyone seriously believes they can’t come up with a way to guess if a file has been generated by AI or not. 90% of the slop out there stands out so much everyone can see how it was made after looking at it for 5 seconds. A more plausible reason for the lack of slop filter is that they are simply testing out the waters. They are checking if users will tolerate it. The question tech executives want answered is: will people buy this garbage? And if the answer to that question is yes, here’s what they will do: they will start generating it themselves. They don’t need the useless meat proxies who think typing ten words and pressing enter makes them creative. They definitely don’t want to verse anyone royalties when they could just be making a one time purchase of tokens. If you think this is not real, just ask Tim Sweeney. I bet he will be more than happy to confirm. Roman Navarro Curation by humans for humans So now that it’s clear that tech companies will not save us from drowning in slop, it’s time to turn back to actual humans instead. The good news is they are a lot of people who are here to help you. There are thousands of people on the internet who will search through mountains of content to find the perfect piece of art they want to share with the world. We don’t explicitly call them curators. They are streamers, bloggers, journalists, DJs, overly enthusiast fans, or simply your friends. Some of those people are seriously amazing. There are DJs out there who will spend thousands of hours digging through crates to craft you the perfect ninety minutes of music. Why do you still need those machine-generated playlists? The alternative to blindly trusting the output of a recommendation algorithm isn’t always to become an expert in every field of art. Sometimes you just have to put the trust you had in a machine back into another person. Back to the real world? The real long term solution would be to stop relying only on the internet for distribution. This is already a thing in the music industry. Every city has a record shop that will sell you a carefully selected set of vinyls. For many musicians, physical sales (and concerts) are a much better source of income than streaming. The same goes for the movie. While text-to-video AI is a thing, the real money isn’t made by generating 30 second TikTok dramas. The real money comes from people paying tickets to see a full-length movie in a theater. Sadly I’m not too optimistic about my own field: video games. Somehow it seems the direction we’ve taken is the opposite. We’re all in on online distributions platforms. We have fully accepted them as our new digital overlords. Next month GTA V is coming out without a disk in the box. Sony already announced that the next Playstation will not support physical media. Physical distribution is not even mentioned in the pitch of the average indie publisher. In Breda, the small Dutch city where I live, we used to have two dedicated video games shop. Higher interests rates, expensive rents, and various policy failures have done their jobs: they are both closed. I don’t think this is a good sign for the survivability of the gaming industry.

The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments. Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks. After a little while, you’ll start recognizing familiar Tetromino shapes in clouds, buildings, and everyday objects. You might even see them appear before your eyes when you start falling asleep. Tom Tang Attention hijacking There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts. This can be a good thing since it’s how we learn new skills and discover new ideas. Sadly, less and less of our attention is focused intentionally. Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us. Do you want to watch a video? YouTube knows you like cooking and art streams. But why not also recommend a few clips about the stock market bubble, global warming, and the war in Iran. Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads. Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists. Do you want to know how your colleagues are doing? Too bad, LinkedIn will bury any relevant career news between the opinion of complete strangers. It is surely just a coincidence that those strangers happen to be shilling whatever Microsoft is invested in at the moment. Do you want the opinion of strangers on a product? Well those Redditors you wanted to ask are probably just a bunch of LLMs talking to a bunch of Russian trolls now. I hope you didn’t value their opinion too much. If, like me and most people, you spend the major part of your day focused on your device, there’s no doubt it’s affecting you. And when you let someone else dictate what appears on your screen, it’s the same as giving them the key to your brain. New York Said Back to an intentional internet The internet wasn’t always like that. Before recommendation algorithms where a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer. You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didn’t update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90s… Of course awful things existed on the web. We had Encyclopedia Dramatica and Rotten.com, but you actually had to put the effort to go there if you wanted. Nobody was going to put pictures of dead kids and far-right propaganda as a suggestion after a pancake recipe or a cat video. The good thing is that this intentional internet is still around. It has just been a bit buried below the corporate web, but it’s not very hard to find. After all you’re on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it. The main difference between this time and now is you. When you want to get back to reading blogs, RSS feeds, and finish that tutorial instead of doomscrolling shorts, you have to get used to a slower internet. One where content is not infinite and doesn’t get updated every click. But like every habit, the only thing you have to do is to keep at it. And if you pay enough attention to it, something will click in your brain.

In April, the Godot foundation organized a conference close to their home base: GodotCon Amsterdam. It was a good occasion for us to showcase Paradox Tower and get some beta feedback from other developers. Most importantly it was two entire days of talks about game development in Godot. Here are some of the ones I recommend checking out if you are into it. 1000 rigged AnimationPlayers in 3D, impossible? Having a lot of animated 3D objects in Godot can seriously damage performance. This is something to look for if you’re developing for systems with limited resources, which may rely on the Compatibility renderer (like Android or Switch). Bertrand Bordage explains how to get around this limitation using Vertex Animation Textures. It basically consists of baking an animation into a shader. I had previously never heard of it and this talk really seems like a doable solution for Switch ports of 3D games. The Clone Wars: Defending Godot Games From Reupload Scams Godot games are very easy to reverse engineer. Many developers assume this is not an issue and will only be used by modders and curious players. Sadly, there’s a cottage industry of shady publishers who will take advantage of this to copy your game. I’ve previously talked a bit about technical countermeasures you can use to make this process harder. In this talk, Yasen Dinkov also explores the legal and marketing aspects of the problem. He provides ideas that can make taking down illegal store pages much easier. From model to gameplay in seconds: setting up your Blender Godot pipeline Doing a lot of manual steps can kill your productivity. A big source of this is manually importing 3D assets and setting them up as Godot scenes. Godot comes with a set of tools to speed that up: post-import scripts. Here, Marion Allard explains how to make the best use of it, with step-by-step examples using Blender objects: Make your own fractal! A more relaxed talk to finish, with a short and fun introduction to fractals by Marta Imke. It explores visual math and the different ways you can build fractal images out of simple functions. This is definitely something that can be useful if you want to create some trippy visual effects.

In the latest Steam client update, Valve unveiled major changes to its store’s home page. One of the main difference is that the “Popular Upcoming” section, which shows upcoming games now shows a lot fewer games. This seems to worry indie developers who relied on this section as a major driver of visibility around launch. I personally think this is will not change much to how indie games are marketed and might even be a positive for many niche developers. Popular upcoming is dead Now that game development is more accessible than ever, and anyone can post their games on Steam and Epic. Since all those new developers need to market their games, this has created a cottage industry of game marketing influencers. The strategy they teach is basically always a variant of: Make a game (and a demo) Get a lot of people to play the demo during Steam Next Fest Get 6000+ Wishlist Appear in Popular Upcoming ??? Profit Since everyone is running around with approximately the same strategy, it became a very crowded trade. With everyone publishing a more and more polished demo, Next Fest began to have diminishing returns for most developers. In the same way Popular Upcoming was very impactful when maybe 1 or 2 games appeared in it every day, but if it shows a dozen game, it’s not a guarantee of success anymore. And let’s be honest, players have probably been paying less and less attention to this section of the store for a while. Basically every shovelware publisher knows how to game the algorithm and get their new version of Slop Simulator 2027 in their. Long live the Personal Calendar In the same update, Valve introduced a new feature: the Personal Calendar. It’s a whole page which aims at making players discover games that are personalized to their taste. The recommendation algorithm seems to work somewhat decently. I do not think it is entirely based on tags, since it seems to recommend me a lot of “Open World Survival Craft” games, which is not something I usually play. It may be using wishlist behavior of similar players to make recommendations. One of the major differences is that it shows a calendar for the next eight weeks, so games can have a much longer visibility window. If a player of your target audience didn’t browse Steam on the day before your launch, it would miss you on popular upcoming, while now they can It also shows recently released games, in the past 7 days and past month. Contrary to the homepage “Popular New Releases” tab (ex “New & Trending”), which requires a lot of active players, this section seems accessible even to unknown games. Steam is currently recommending me Imago Season with at the moment 0 review and only 2 concurrent players. A new era for niche games? Before this change, it was extremely difficult for developers to market niche games. I know it from first-hand experience, since I have no doubt Dice ‘n Goblins would have been easier to market if it was not the weirdest combination of ideas possible. Because of this, a lot of new indie game developers were advised to stick to a very popular genre. You love real-time strategy? Too bad, you’ll have to make an action roguelike instead. This has led to a loss of creativity in the indie game world. With many developers working on genres that do not interest them, using recycled ideas and aesthetics. I do believe that this new version of Steam might swing the pendulum in the other way. Now that players of niche games can get recommendation customized to their taste, making games for a non-mainstream audience can become viable again.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with building games in Ebitengine. It’s a 2D engine that lets you create games using the Go programming language. To be able to iterate faster on visual effects, I have created a tool that lets me preview shaders: Luluka. Kage Shaders For those who feel like they missed an episode, shaders are small programs running on the GPU which can be used to modify the pixels of an image. In games, they are used everywhere to control how a game looks. They can be used create special effects like blurring an image or making your screen look like a CRT from the 90s. Ebitengine has its own shader language called Kage. It is very convenient because it has a syntax extremely close to Go. Close enough that you can even run go fmt to format your Kage files. Under the hood, Ebitengine will automatically convert Kage shaders into a format understandable by the GPU. Quasilyte’s article about Ebitengine shaders is generally the most comprehensive introduction to the subject. You can also learn more about them in the Kage’s desk. Luluka One of the main difference between Ebitengine and other game engines like Godot, is that it doesn’t have a visual editor. This is generally fine, since I’ve spent most of my career avoiding What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get tools in favor of staying inside NeoVim. But for shaders, you can end up spending a lot of time tweaking a few variables until you get them to look right. That’s why I decided to build my own tool that would let me work on a shader in isolation, and quickly change the variables we give it. You can install Luluka using the following command: go install github.com/Tsukumogami-Software/[email protected] Run a shader by pointing it straight to the file, passing textures with -i and uniform values with -u: luluka sample/transition.kage -i image2.png -i image.png -u Steepness:80 -u Seed.0:15 -u Seed.1:100 -u Seed.2:5000 -u Seed.3:5000 -u Speed:0.08 For more convenience, you can use a YAML file to pass your uniform values. This is especially practical when working with arrays or matrices, since commands can get very long: Steepness: 80 Seed: [15.0, 100.0, 5000.0] Speed: 0.08 luluka sample/transition.kage -i image2.png -i image.png -v values.yaml