Serena Howard (UK Env Artist LFW!)

raycast node from blender 5.1

The House of Lords Digital & Communications Committee just published their report on AI, copyright & the creative industries, and their conclusions could not be clearer.

🧵 1/5

characters from Granado Espada

A render of Ann Darrow from Peter Jackson's King Kong for the PS2 (screenshot specifically from Noodle's video about the game)

Monster Hunter Tri

whatever you call this art style - PS2 era medium-poly characters with hand-made highly detailed but also somewhat blurry textures with baked-in lighting - I absolutely love it and it makes me want to drop everything and make games

should do studies like this more often

I think it's neat our character creator is going to have prosthetic options :) bsky.app/profile/ko-o...

When you click the "beautify slide" AI feature in Google Slides.

NOT A JOKE

As someone who never quite left the dinosaur phase behind, this game is the perfect pitch for me! Dig up dinosaur bones and start your own museum you say?? Hell yes I'm wishlisting that

Ban the fucking polymarkets. Betting on death. Betting on war while Incentivizing death and war. Shaping foreign/domestic policy by rewarding the rich people already in the know and encouraging them to make decisions that destroy the world while padding their pockets. Burn it down.

- then you should do yourself a favour and go play The Long Dark, one of the best survival games of all time!
Experience the world's worst rope bridge, see the most awe inspiring and dangerous aurora in gaming, and get jumpscared out of your skin by wildlife. It's genuinely a one of a kind game.

If u want to exp how perfectly a game can dovetail feelings like "immediate concern: vertigo bridge scary" and "you're completely alone, no help is coming. Nature and hubris can + will kill you more effectively than any human. Isolation/dread/beauty are one and the same here. Despair and suffer."-

Ig my point is, not many games can take that minimalist sorta approach to evoking a specific feeling/combo of feelings from players and nail it as well as The Long Dark.
It's 8 yrs old but the visuals/anbience have barely aged a day, and it's still a masterclass in simple but effective game design.

It's also one of v few games that uses little except level design, ambience + an occasional quiet dialogue bark super effectively to evoke a v unique sense of dread, plus the hope/relief once you get past the dread (if u live). A kinda minimalist approach to game design that aged like fine wine imo

...teach you their rules/strats via exposition dumps or constant UI tooltips or compass markers telling you precisely where to go and what to do.

There's a balance between spoonfeeding info vs letting player infer info from in world context cues, and TLD gets the balance right for me personally.

I'm sure smarter folks than me cld explain the difference between methods of learning but all I know for sure is, the way TLD teaches me to learn things abt its world (by observing, by testing theories, by knowing when to be cautious vs when to take opportunities) is so different from games that...

It's quiet and lonely in a v meditative sorta way, for me at least. They call it the quiet apocalypse for a reason, the lack of helpful NPCs to handhold you thru its empty world makes you rly engage + slowly learn how to handle its challenges, by observing and testing your limits of knowledge.

To try to articulate my point a bit better (this will prob be a 🧵):

If you like to 1. feel lost + go exploring when gaming and 2. want to feel self reliant against adversity, then TLD is a perfect antidote game when you're burned out on side quests, collectibles, visual effects, forgettable NPCS.

I have such a hard to articulate in a skeet relationship w TLD (positive!).
It's existed for almost exactly as long as I've been attempting gamedev, it's always where I turn when I want to have certain exp + feels I can't easily define or find in other games. Like "world's worst rope bridge" feels.

This is the type of result you can get if you also tweak some shader and post processing stuff

Kevin Lister posted I was interviewed by Hillary Cass during the research phase of the Cass Review. She asked me two significant questions. 1. Did I think the transgender movement was adult led or child led? 2. Did I think there was a link between autistic children and trans children? In my interview with her, I said it was adult led and child amplified.

1/🧵 Just saw this awful post by a transphobic former teacher, who unintentionally reveals Hilary Cass to be the crank she is.

Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.

Oops. Turns out Persona, Discord’s age-verification service, was secretly screening selfies against government watchlists AND accessible by the feds. It's backed by Peter Thiel.

“The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they've learned to work together.”

Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it Workers should learn AI skills and companies should use it because it's a "cognitive amplifier," claims Satya Nadella.

Lots of them are panicking that AI uptake isn't fast enough and they might run out of momentum to do the sweep they are attempting to do on society.

This isn't about AI, it's about the window in which they have permission to remould society.

www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/...

To be frank, I'm currently working brutal hospitality shifts bc the games industry doesn't want to employ juniors, and I can't subsist on exposure. The idea that I'll be stuck doing that forever bc in a year or 2 there won't be UK games industry to try to return to, honestly kills me inside a little

Of course I don't want this industry to die, nobody does, but I'm struggling to see how gamedev can be sustained or reinvigorated in these conditions. Endless layoffs/closures/cancellations, until what? the entire industry is dead and nobody can work in it? Is that the only viable endpoint here?

So. What's the endgame here, games industry execs? When all studios except a handful of massive tech giants have closed/laid off most devs, when only skeleton crews are left propping up a zombie industry, when pitch funding to indies fully dries up - how exactly can anyone continue to make games??

Absolutely fucking insane. There’s literally no point anymore, this entire industry should be rioting lol

Friendly reminder:

NO ONE needs AI slop and more AI data centres

EVERYBODY needs clean water, affordable energy, and a habitable planet

I don't need a 20min course to tell me this is a desperate attempt to:
- shovel taxpayer money into the sinking ship
- try to "encourage" uptick in its use (salvage the bubble)
- make all prev glowing endorsements + talk of it being the future retroactively justifiable

Bit pathetic tbh. I'll pass.

That late 80s, early 90s OVA cyberpunk... That's the stuff.

Polanski is a pleasure to interview because he will answer any question about anyone. Wes Streeting? “Wes is attacking me every day on social media because I’m another gay man in politics who is not willing to throw the trans community under the bus and that exposes his abject immorality. He must know what it’s like to be othered but he’s more bothered about power than protecting the other. It’s disgraceful.”

Okay but Zack Polanski has been coming out with bangers