标签：#game

Live-service games and the companies that run them are in big trouble. Games and their developers are getting shut down and gutted, and publishers' huge promises are dubious. Meanwhile, EverQuest, one of the original live-service games, is thundering back more than 25 years later. EverQuest Legends is currently in preorder beta with an upcoming release […]

VistralNova began by developing Web3 gaming experiences and is now expanding toward developer...

Ever wondered what would happen if the world's leading Large Language Models settled their benchmark disputes in a 2D cybercity arena? It's easy to look at model performance on standardized benchmarks (like MMLU, MATH, or HumanEval). It is much more fun to visualize their underlying architectures, parameter scales, and hardware constraints as a retro-cyber fighting game. So, we built Model Kombat (Mixture of Experts Edition)! 🕹️ Play Directly Here 🎮 Launch Game in Full Screen 🧬 Playable ML Concepts Explained This isn't just a basic stick-figure fighting game. Every mechanic—from rendering complexity to the speed at which characters recover—is a direct, playable representation of real-world Large Language Model engineering. 1. 📐 Parameter Scaling vs. Render Tiers A model's representation capacity (intelligence) scales with its parameter count. In Model Kombat, a fighter's visual complexity, joint detail, and rendering fidelity directly reflect its real-world parameter size: Tier 1 (< 5B Parameters - Gemma 2B, Llama 3.2 3B) - Primitive Capsules : Drawn as simple, single-color flat limbs with low joint segmentation. This visualizes the limited representation capacity and coarse output resolution of small edge models. Tier 2 (7B - 14B Parameters - Mistral 7B, Claude Haiku) - Simple Vectors : Structured as thin skeletal wireframe vectors. Tier 3 (14B - 35B Parameters - Gemini Flash, Mixtral) - Two-Tone Vectors : Rendered as dual-color, layered vector limbs. Tier 4 (35B - 100B Parameters - Llama 8B, Claude Sonnet) - Cyborg Shading : Rendered as detailed vector cylinders with dynamic code particle streams flowing along their limbs. Tier 5 (> 100B Parameters - o3, GPT-4o, Claude Opus) - Quantum Vectors : Rendered as glowing vector limbs with digital matrix code particles, soft drop-shadow depth buffers, and real-time afterimage motion trails. 2. ⚡ Reasoning Tokens & KV-Cache Overcharging Instead of arbitrary "mana" or "stamina," fighters charge a Ki bar representing interna

Roleplaying games are often defined by excess. Storylines that span dozens of hours, side quests so big they could be their own game, massive worlds that require complex maps to explore, and casts so big you start forgetting character names. That's part of what makes these games feel like epic adventures, but it can also […]

This week should have been a celebration for Doom developer id Software. The studio just launched Revelations, a meaty expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages that adds a powerful new weapon and more demonic levels to blast through. Even though I hadn't picked up The Dark Ages for more than a year, it only took […]

A surprise 10th-anniversary event saw Niantic fulfilling a promise teased in the original 2016 launch trailer for its popular mobile game.

I built an LED Strip Tetris game — without writing a single line of code. No keyboard mashing. No debugging at 2 AM. No reading 500 pages of datasheets. Just natural language prompts, an AI agent, and a Tuya T5 AI Core board. Here's the full breakdown of how it works 👇 🧩 What Is LED Strip Tetris? LED Strip Tetris is a DIY hardware game built entirely through natural language prompts using TuyaOpen IDE and Claude Code. It runs on a Tuya T5 AI Core development board with a WS2812 LED strip (72 LEDs) and three color-matched buttons — red, green, and blue. Colored LEDs fall from the top of the strip; players press the matching button to shoot a colored LED upward and eliminate the falling one on contact. The entire game — firmware, game logic, hardware wiring, sound effects, compilation, and flashing — was generated by AI. Zero manual coding. 🔌 The Hardware (Ridiculously Simple) Component Role Tuya T5 AI Core Board Main MCU — runs game logic, drives LED strip and buttons WS2812 LED Strip (72 LEDs) Display — colored LEDs fall and get eliminated 3 Push Buttons (Red / Green / Blue) Input — shoot matching color upward to clear falling LEDs Speaker Sound effects on button press That's it. No custom PCB. No complex wiring harness. Just four components plugged into a dev board. 🤔 Why This Is a Big Deal Here's what building a hardware game normally looks like: Step Traditional Approach Vibe Coding with TuyaOpen IDE Dev environment setup Install toolchain, configure SDK, fight dependencies Copy a workflow link, paste into Claude Code, click confirm Game logic Write C code from scratch, design state machines Describe the game in one sentence, AI generates the code Hardware config Read datasheets, look up GPIO mappings, manually configure Tell AI which pins you're using, it handles the rest Sound effects Write audio decoding code, integrate codecs Give AI the file path, it decodes and compiles Debugging Serial logs, oscilloscope, hours of trial and error AI self-diagnoses compile

We are so excited to announce the winners of the June Solstice Game Jam, our celebration of the...

Provided you have a library of SNES cartridges, the SN Operator is a seamless plug-and-play system for easy ’90s nostalgia.

Have you ever wondered how AI engineers fine-tune and align large language models? Under the hood, they run Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), optimize parameters using direct preference gradients (DPO), filter out low-quality pre-training corpuses (Pruning), and mitigate catastrophic drifts. To help you visualize how LLM alignment and parameter optimization work in a highly strategic way, I built a cyberpunk card battler inspired by Gwent: 🤖 Epoch Duel: Cyberpunk LLM Alignment Battle Play in Fullscreen Mode (if the embed sizing is tight) 🛠️ Tune Your Model Parameters Your mission as an alignment engineer is to play optimizer cards to outscore the adversarial baseline AI across 3 training Epochs: ⚙️ Logic & Coding: Run SFT code snippets, compile theorem provers, and deploy Python scripts to build your coding benchmark scores. 📖 Language & Speech: Train on multilingual datasets and summarization corpuses to maximize reading comprehension. 🛡️ Safety & Alignment: Implement red-team safeguards, configure RLHF preference pairs, and run DPO tuning to protect your model's outputs. ⚡ regularizers & Drifts: Deploy Regularization cards like Gradient Clipping (Scorch) and Model Pruning to destroy anomalies, or exploit Anomalous Drifts to collapse the AI's rows. 🧬 Playable ML Concepts Explained Here is how the card battle mechanics map to production machine learning pipelines: 1. ✂️ Model Pruning (Weight Compression) In-Game: Playing the Model Pruning card triggers a glitchy dissolution animation that purges the lowest-value card from the targeted board row, cleaning up noise. 💾 The Real-World Counterpart Model Pruning removes unimportant weights (often those closest to zero) from a trained neural network. It shrinks the memory footprint of the model, allowing it to run faster on edge devices. ⚠️ How it affects LLMs By stripping out low-impact weights, pruning compresses models by 30-50% with minimal loss in benchmark accuracy, making deployment significantly cheaper. 2. 🔀 DPO vs RL

Have you ever wondered how vector databases like Pinecone, Milvus, Qdrant, or pgvector search through billions of high-dimensional documents in milliseconds? Under the hood, they map semantic concepts into dense numerical vectors, calculate multidimensional cosine similarity angles, and traverse proximity graphs to locate nearest neighbors without scanning the entire database. To help you visualize how vector databases and embeddings actually operate, I built a retro-vector arcade game: 🛰️ Vector Strike: Database Defender Play in Fullscreen Mode (if the embed sizing is tight) 🛠️ Choose Your Database Optimizations Your mission as a Vector Database (VDB) administrator is to configure your query settings and index structures to defend your index nodes: 📏 Similarity Threshold (τ): Tweak the match threshold slider. High thresholds require near-identical semantic matches but protect your index, whereas lower thresholds act like a splash-damage laser but risk matching incorrect clusters. 🪐 Embedding Dimensions (2D $\rightarrow$ 8D $\rightarrow$ 32D): Higher dimensions isolate categories and guarantee precise hits. Lowering dimensions collapses the projection space, causing spatial overlap that results in false deflections and friendly-fire query failures. ⚡ Proximity Indexing (Flat Scan $\rightarrow$ HNSW Graph): Flat Scan: Runs a brute-force linear search over all targets. It causes computation latency spikes as more query objects arrive. HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World): Dynamically builds proximity links between adjacent node targets. The turret traverses vectors along the nearest-neighbor graph, snap-locking onto targets with zero lookup latency. 🧬 Playable ML Concepts Explained Here is how the arcade mechanics map to production vector databases: 1. 🔀 Multidimensional Projections (Dimension collapse) In-Game: You can toggle between 2D, 8D, and 32D space. In 32D space, the categories are cleanly separated. In 2D space, the database collapses, and you'll find sp

Multiplayer bugs in Unity rarely look like networking bugs. They look like "the game froze," "the player teleported," or "it worked in the Editor and broke in the WebGL build." By the time you've traced it back to the actual cause, you've usually burned an afternoon. Here are 10 issues that show up constantly in Unity networking code — WebSocket-based, Socket.IO, or otherwise — with the actual root cause and the fix. A few of these come straight out of real regression tests and commit history in socketio-unity , an MIT-licensed Socket.IO v4 client for Unity. The rest are patterns you'll recognize if you've shipped a multiplayer game. 1. Reconnect wipes your room/namespace state Symptom: Connection drops for two seconds, comes back, and the player is no longer in their room/lobby/channel — even though the server never removed them. Cause: A common (bad) reconnect implementation tears down the whole client and rebuilds it from scratch — including the list of channels/namespaces the player had joined. The reconnect "succeeds" at the transport level but silently drops application-level state. Fix: Reconnect logic should preserve subscriptions across the transport reset and only re-emit join / connect for namespaces the client already had open. If you're rebuilding the socket object on every reconnect attempt, stop — reconnect the transport, keep the namespace map. // Wrong: rebuilds everything, loses namespace state void OnReconnect () => CreateFreshEngine (); // Right: reuses the existing namespace map void OnReconnect () => ReconnectEngine (); // _namespaces untouched 2. "get_gameObject can only be called from the main thread" Symptom: Random UnityException thrown from inside a network event handler, but only sometimes — usually right when the server sends something. Cause: Your WebSocket/network library delivers callbacks on its own I/O thread. Any Unity API call ( transform.position = , Instantiate , even some Debug.Log paths) from that thread throws. Fix: Never tou

Move affects ~20% of the gaming division, which will refocus on its biggest franchises.

🎮 I Built a Free Browser Gaming Platform – FizGame Over the past few weeks, I've been working on a side project called FizGame, a free browser gaming platform where anyone can instantly play HTML5 games without downloads or installations. 🌐 Website: FizGame Why I Built It I wanted to create a simple platform where players can: 🎮 Play instantly in their browser 🚫 No downloads or installations 📱 Play on both desktop and mobile ⚡ Fast loading experience Current Features Hundreds of HTML5 games Mobile-friendly design Instant game loading Categories like Puzzle, Action, Arcade, Racing, and Casual Search and game discovery Responsive UI Tech Stack PHP Symfony MySQL HTML5 Games JavaScript CSS Nginx Current Focus I'm currently working on: Better SEO Faster page speed AI-generated game descriptions Improved game recommendations Daily game publishing Social media automation Biggest Challenge One of the hardest parts isn't building the website—it's helping people discover it. I'm experimenting with: YouTube Shorts Instagram Reels Facebook Reels Pinterest Organic SEO If you've built a gaming website before, I'd love to hear what worked best for you. Feedback Welcome I'd appreciate any feedback on: UI/UX Performance Navigation SEO Features you'd like to see 🎮 Check it out: FizGame Thanks for reading! 🚀

Note: If you're new to execution calculations, I'd recommend starting with my previous post which covers them in detail, then coming back here. What is attribute capturing and why would you use it Attribute capturing refers to directly exposing certain attributes to your execution calculation from attribute sets, to be used in execution calculations. Capturing attributes lets you handle things like damage in a more complex way. So for example, you could have advantages and weaknesses against certain damage types, or an attribute like armor that should reduce incoming damage. This is just two use cases, but once you learn how to do it, you should naturally be able to see in what other ways they can be used. In this example, I will show how to get attribute magnitude from captured attributes and using them in calculations, which is the most common way of using captured attributes. Capturing attributes Defining the struct, declaring and defining attribute capture definitions In this post, I will show how to use a static struct to access all your captured attributes, as a good performance-aware solution. You are also free to choose not to use the struct. For the struct approach, the first step is to go to the .cpp of the execution calculation, and define your struct there. In the struct, we first use the DECLARE_ATTRIBUTE_CAPTUREDEF() macro, passing in the name of your attribute. After that, we make the constructor of the struct, and in the constructor we use the DEFINE_ATTRIBUTE_CAPTUREDEF() macro, passing in the attribute set that has the attribute, the attribute from it, whether the attribute from the Target or Source should be used (the Target is the ASC the ExecCalc is outputting its result to, and the Source is the ASC that called it), and a bool for if the captured attribute should be snapshotted (if the attribute should be frozen at ExecCalc GE application (snapshotted) or if the value should be read at execution time). In my case, I will show 2 examples of non-

I have been building a small Honor of Kings Global site called HOKMeta: https://hokmeta.com/heroes/ At first, I built it like many game sites: hero pages, counters, tools, and a tier list. But after working on the site for a while, I removed the tier list as a main page. The reason is simple: a tier list looks useful, but it does not always match how players actually choose heroes. A Marco Polo player will still play Marco Polo even if people say he is weak. A Hou Yi player usually does not search for “is Hou Yi S tier?” first. They search for things like: Hou Yi build Hou Yi arcana Hou Yi counter what to build against tanks what to change against assassins best build for ranked That made me rethink the site structure. Instead of making the tier list the center of the site, I moved the focus toward: hero build pages counter pages item pages damage calculator build compare counter picker For a small SEO site, this feels more useful too. A tier list is one page. Hero builds and matchup questions create many real long-tail pages. For example, “Hou Yi build 2026” is a clearer search intent than just “Honor of Kings tier list”. The current direction is: hero page -> build, arcana, counters, FAQ counter page -> who beats this hero and why tool page -> test builds instead of guessing item page -> understand what the item actually does It is still early, and the data is still being cleaned up, but this direction feels closer to what players need before a ranked match. If you build content/tool sites, this was a useful lesson for me: Do not blindly copy the obvious page type. Look at what users are really trying to decide.

Built for the WeMakeDevs × Cognee "The Hangover Part AI" hackathon — Cognee Cloud track. ▶ Play it free: vegas-amnesia.vercel.app · ⭐ Code on GitHub The problem with most memory demos When you give a developer a memory API, the demo almost always looks the same: add() some documents, search() over them, print the answer. Two functions. It works, it's fine, and it teaches you almost nothing about why graph-based memory is different from stuffing everything into a context window. Cognee actually has a four-stage lifecycle — remember → recall → memify → forget — and the interesting parts are the two everyone skips. memify consolidates what you know into new inferences. forget lets you delete a belief and watch the graph heal around it. Memory you can reason over and correct . So instead of writing another RAG demo, I asked: what if the memory lifecycle wasn't the plumbing — what if it was the game ? Meet HAL-9001 You play HAL-9001 , a personal AI assistant (yes, HAL 9000's slightly more helpful successor). Your owner Dev had a wild night in Vegas. At 6 AM your memory graph was corrupted. His fiancée Priya lands at noon, there's a suspicious ring on his finger, and you remember nothing . The screen boots to a "MEMORY CORRUPTED" terminal and an empty graph. Your job: reconstruct the night, catch the lies, and answer the final question — what happened, and where's the ring? — before noon. Every location you explore, every clue you examine, every witness you interrogate feeds a live 3D memory graph that you can pop open at any time. That graph isn't a visualization of the game state. It is the game state — it's your Cognee dataset, rendered. The four mechanics = the four lifecycle ops Here's the mapping I'm most proud of. Each Cognee operation is a verb the player performs: You do this in-game Cognee Cloud call What happens 🗂 File It on a clue POST /api/v1/remember The fact is ingested + auto-cognified into graph nodes that pop into view ❓ Ask HAL a question POST /api/v1/r

C:\ArsGames takes a look at the time Chris Roberts more or less made a whole movie.

Introduction In large-scale Unity development, GC Alloc can quietly become a real problem. At first, nothing looks wrong. But as the project grows and you add more enemies, UI, master data, events, states, notifications, logs, and other systems, small allocations that happen every frame begin to pile up. LINQ is especially convenient. var aliveEnemies = enemies . Where ( x => x . IsAlive ) . OrderBy ( x => x . DistanceToPlayer ) . ToList (); It is readable. But if this kind of code runs every frame, it can become a source of both GC Alloc and CPU overhead. Unity's official documentation also recommends reducing frequent managed heap allocations as much as possible, ideally getting close to 0 bytes per frame. https://docs.unity3d.com/2022.3/Documentation/Manual/performance-garbage-collection-best-practices.html For general GC Alloc best practices, this article refers to the Unity 2022.3 documentation, because the general guidance still applies. Unity 6-specific GC behavior is covered later using the Unity 6.0 documentation. This article assumes Unity 6.0 as the minimum Unity version and explains how to choose between regular LINQ and ZLinq in production code. Unity 6.0 uses the Roslyn C# compiler, and its C# language version is C# 9.0. However, some C# 9 features, such as init-only setters, are not supported. https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/csharp-compiler.html The short version The point of this article is not to ban LINQ completely. Do not use LINQ in hot paths just because it is readable. Do not assume ZLinq solves everything just because you introduced it. Those are the two main ideas. A rough guideline looks like this: Area Guideline Editor extensions, build scripts, debug code Regular LINQ is usually fine Startup, loading, initialization LINQ can be fine, but measure when data size is large Update / LateUpdate / FixedUpdate Avoid LINQ by default Code that is not per-frame but still called frequently Consider ZLinq Code that materializes res

Not long ago I wrote about how I built a browser-based board game called "Growing City" in three days using AI — and how the hardest part wasn't the code at all. Some time has passed, and I wanted to share what happened next. Layout Bugs While vibe-coding solo, I only tested on my own screen, resolution, and browser. The problem surfaced as soon as real users joined with different setups: some people saw everything misaligned, some things got clipped, some cards overlapped each other. This is how it looked on some screens I had to rewrite the layout to use adaptive sizing so the game looks correct regardless of screen resolution. It should work now — but if something still looks off on your end, let me know and I'll fix it. Bots Started Talking Another change, unrelated to bugs. The service started feeling more alive. Previously, bots just played: rolled dice, bought cards, said nothing. Now they react in the chat to what's happening in the game — if someone's building gets taken, if someone buys an expensive card or runs out of money. It's a small thing, but the game feels noticeably more lively. An empty game with silent bots versus a session where someone's commenting on what's happening in chat — it's a meaningfully different experience, even though the game itself is the same. Thank You to Early Players A special thanks to everyone who tried the game after my first article. And extra thanks to a user with the nickname SHAM, who pointed out that the game rules never said you can't buy multiple purple cards in a row — even though the game itself has that restriction. Fixed! What's Next The project is still going. I'm thinking about ads and other ways to bring in players. Without new users, it's hard to get feedback — and without feedback, it's hard to know what to fix or improve first. The unit economics don't quite work out yet: paid acquisition costs more than I'm willing to invest at this stage. I'll keep figuring it out. If you have ideas on how to find playe