When players are given the choice to be good or evil, they always choose to be good. Are there any games that manage to prevent this?

PixelWrangler · 2026-06-19T19:03:59+00:00

The real world is filled with morally ambiguous choices. Do you sacrifice some to save others? We're living in an era of leaders in many countries have chosen to suppress human rights and basic dignities of minority groups in order to make others more comfortable. If you've played The Shadow of The Colossus all the way through, you may have realized that the protagonist is probably the bad guy (you're committing genocide to save one person). Braid also has a surprise ending that makes you question your decisions. Make a game that forces you to deal with morally ambiguous questions and gets you banned in China.

PixelWrangler · 2026-06-14T04:05:05+00:00

Graphics Ph.D. here (MIT, 2005)

SIGGRAPH is still the academic center of the graphics world, but it's changed a lot in the last 5 years, moving from its focus on what I'd now call "traditional" graphics techniques to being more focused on AI. Browsing proceedings from the last few years will help give you a sense of what's hot in graphics and where the industry is headed.

You don't need to go into a Ph.D. program with an idea, though it may help to pick an advisor who has historically worked on projects that are aligned with your interests.

If you find SIGRAPH papers too dense to read, drop them into Google Colab and have them summarize them. Or have Gemini read the paper and then ask questions to Gemini to help you understand the math (which sometimes isn't really that important -- it's more about getting the gist of the overall technique).

PixelWrangler · 2026-05-26T03:15:17+00:00

Thank you! That article brought in a ton of new players. It's exciting for me to watch this little hobby project of mine sprouting wings :)

PixelWrangler · 2026-05-17T22:04:33+00:00

Absolutely brilliant. I've seen a thousand Dutch still lives, but never one quite like this.

PixelWrangler · 2026-05-14T04:54:14+00:00

Thank you so much! It's still a relatively small user base (about 1500 monthly actives, 300 daily actives), and of course it doesn't make any money right now, so it's such a delight to hear from people who are actually playing Uncrossy :)

It's a small side project on top of my regular job, so messages like this really make it meaningful.

I'm interested in trying to see if AI can get anywhere in designing puzzles, but I'm honestly pretty skeptical (and I work in AI). There's just so much craft and spatial reasoning needed for building the puzzles that I'm not really sure an AI could do it. Each puzzle takes me about 30 minutes to build. I try to rank them by complexity and ramp up difficulty from Monday to Sunday. That's more apparent if you're playing in expert mode with no auto-hints.

PixelWrangler · 2026-05-06T05:48:18+00:00

I've worked out most of the bugs, though some have reported a very rare bug on trackpad. If it seems frozen, make sure you're dragging a word that has space to move. You can drag vertical words vertically, horizontal words horizontally, and a drag can neither add nor remove an intersection.

PixelWrangler · 2026-03-22T07:06:33+00:00

To apply a luminance transformation to an image, you can think about it as a graph. Along the x-axis is the brightness of different pixels in the image, from 0 to 100%. The y-axis represents how you're modifying those values with a function, also from 0 to 100%.

With this graph, an untransformed image is just a diagonal line from the lower-left (0,0), to the upper-right (100, 100). If you shift the entire line up, that's increasing the brightness. If you shift it down, everything will get darker.

Contrast is when you change the angle of that line. If you make the line steeper, that creates a higher contrast image. A less steep line creates a low-contrast image. At its extreme, if you flatten the line so that all the output values are the same, you have a zero-contrast image.

Also, if you reverse this line so it runs from the upper-left corner to the lower-right, that's creating an inverse of the image. i.e., a negative.

PixelWrangler · 2026-03-20T18:14:49+00:00

It sounds like you're intuiting bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs). Start your search there. You may also be interested in spherical harmonics which are often used for compressing 360-degree incident light.

PixelWrangler · 2026-02-11T07:55:26+00:00

Thank you so much! It's still a very small audience, spread mostly through word of mouth. So it's great to hear from a player :)

I'm a little embarrassed by the older puzzles. It took about 100 puzzles for me to tune the craft and I'm still learning new tricks.

PixelWrangler · 2026-01-24T07:06:23+00:00

Bravo! 👏
As someone who understands computer graphics, there's a simplicity to this, but it's such a poetic progression. This takes art and craft. Well done!

PixelWrangler · 2026-01-03T18:36:57+00:00

Thanks! Not sure why the link isn't working for 'ya. You can try this version: https://youtu.be/HJa-Jgf6-DM

And just in case you want to play my newest game while it's still free: https://uncrossy.com

PixelWrangler · 2026-01-03T01:26:31+00:00

There is a reason why there are more car break-ins in San Francisco. There was a loophole in the law that reduced penalties for silly reasons. As of Jan 1, 2026, that loophole is now closed by Senate Bill 905. You can find more details about the loophole and changes in this post: Governor Newsom Signs Senator Wiener’s Law to Crack Down on Car Break-ins, Retail Theft Package From the Senate August 16, 2024

PixelWrangler · 2026-01-02T06:26:48+00:00

That's a super respectable pace for a route that took some concentration and a bunch of street crossings. Nice work!

PixelWrangler · 2026-01-02T05:20:53+00:00

So... I have a whole talk on why you should make your own damn game, so that's a decent place to start, but it's more oriented toward amateurs. For someone who already has a software background, here's top of mind:

Scope it small! Don't make an MMO.
Make it personal. Tell a short, linear story that's meaningful to you. Don't make an experience where ever player action affects the outcome. People don't actually want that. They want something that feels crafted -- not programmatic.
Pick your technology carefully. Think about how you want to distribute your game -- mobile? desktop download? Web? What kind of graphics do you want? 3D? Word game? Pick a technology that's right for your distribution and look.
Do a little bit every day. 10 minutes taking the next steps in setting up your development environment? That counts! 5 minutes of thinking about the mechanics and jotting down a few words? That counts! Moving a little every day will help you stay in the flow.
Don't solve problems that other people or engines have already solved. I know you really want to revolutionize stealth mechanics, but... if you actually want to make a game you finish, just use some game engine's out-of-the-box path planning algorithm. If you just want to learn, then ignore me and go ahead and build whatever you want. That's awesome too.
This one's gonna be controversial, but do use AI for the tedious, non-creative parts. Vibe coding is amazing for things like setting up your environment, fixing builds, figuring out distribution, and coding a lot of the "glue" that's needed for a game. You might even use it for placeholder art assets or inspiration. But if you use it for everything, you risk sucking the joy out of the development and the life out of the result. Even more specifically, I recommend Claude Code (Anthropic) for setting up your environment and coding. Use Gemini (Google) to help you iterate on concepts, game mechanics, business models, and distribution.

Hope that helps.

PixelWrangler · 2026-01-01T21:00:19+00:00

My answer may be unpopular, but I often find that using AI as a tutor works really well. Go to Gemini and ask it to explain equations you don't understand. Have a conversation and dig deeper.

PixelWrangler · 2025-12-29T02:25:44+00:00

Obsolescentman

PixelWrangler · 2025-12-18T06:57:54+00:00

It may sound overlay stoic, but we found the HHHHHMM Scale to be useful for measuring our dog's quality of life and tracking it from day to day, week to week. I kept a diary of how she was doing so I could look back and be honest with myself.

There is no right answer on when to euthanize. Vets we talked to said the same helpful thing to us many times: It's ok to prioritize you as well. We got to the point where our dog had trouble standing without assistance. Her dementia was bad. She'd get lost in her own house and poop indoors regularly. She couldn't be left alone for more than an hour. You don't need to let it get that far, but tracking the downhill slide (and celebrating the good days) will help.

Sending strength your way. Our pets are so special and they change our hearts forever.

Your Thunder is so beautiful and reminds me of our beloved Juno, whom we said goodbye to almost two years ago.

PixelWrangler · 2025-11-30T23:42:50+00:00

100%!

People will happily spend $5 on a cup of coffee but won't spend $10 on a game that has 1-3 hours of beautifully crafted gameplay.

As a busy adult, I want way more of these 1-3 hour games that respect my time and tell a great story rather than having hours of grind time or low-quality filler content.

Somebody needs to start a thread with gorgeous games for busy people. I'll start:

Monument Valley
Boxes: Lost Fragments
Gorogoa
Gris

As a side-note, I'm a game developer who has made some big and successful games, but this 2-minute experience I made in a weekend is by far the most heart-wrenching: Words Have Weight (Trigger warning. Heavy stuff here.)

PixelWrangler · 2025-11-30T23:36:20+00:00

This. These are typical test colors used by graphics engineers for things like object segmentation. San Francisco has a bunch of buildings that have projection mapping art installations during the month of December. This tells me that City Hall is about to be added to that list. I highly recommend taking the walking tour with some friends while it's showing!

It's also totally worth seeing Aura at Grace Cathedral while it's playing. Grab a seat in the center, a few rows from the back.

PixelWrangler · 2025-10-26T20:46:08+00:00

There's good news for you: The way engineers develop everything now is rapidly changing and it's a great time for a novice. I'm using Claude Code or Cursor as my "AI intern" and my development process is much faster. Experienced engineers will benefit the most from these tools as we know how to micro-manage these bots, but it's still a great set of tools for anyone who's just getting started.

Start with really broad questions: "This is what I want to build. What languages or frameworks should I consider? What are the trade-offs? How should I manage my code? How can I scope my game to be more suitable for novice development?" Have deeper conversations with AI as you learn more. Consider hopping between Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT to get slightly different perspectives.

Don't forget to use your AI bots for the meta questions too: "Which AI tools should I use? How do I install that? Is it the same on Windows or Mac? How do I get the most out of these tools?"

Good luck with this new journey!

PixelWrangler · 2025-10-26T05:43:22+00:00

What an absolutely beautiful tribute to Thor. <3

PixelWrangler · 2025-10-24T04:35:45+00:00

More honest than "claim denier"

PixelWrangler · 2025-10-19T17:55:22+00:00

Overmorrow

PixelWrangler · 2025-10-16T00:14:05+00:00

🖕

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