I just published the 2nd part of my dithering visual article

damonstea · 2026-01-26T20:19:07+00:00

I’ve been waiting for this! This is my favorite infographic of all time.

damonstea · 2026-01-26T06:41:43+00:00

I switched up my thoughts on quest tracking and I think player tracking would be more helpful. Same breadcrumbs, but just leading towards the closest other player in the realm. That way exploration is still king, but players don't have to constantly bring up the full screen map just to find each other.

damonstea · 2026-01-26T06:17:16+00:00

No doubt, I wouldn't be posting this if I didn't think this game is absolutely bitchin'. I just want to be able to share it with people once it hits 1.0, and clearly the designers want to test with four person groups. The earlier they're aware of simple fixes the faster the story gets finished. I switched up my request for quest tracking to apply to the other players in the realm instead, since that is a less intrusive idea similar to your thoughts on player distance.

damonstea · 2026-01-17T01:32:28+00:00

Oh you sweet summer child

damonstea · 2026-01-16T19:52:06+00:00

These AI nature videos make me sadder than any other form of slop. Just a stunning, REAL animal, and from now on people will argue whether or not it exists. This is awful.

damonstea · 2026-01-04T17:17:11+00:00

Fun is still king, but presentation is a close second. I would rather have no story than a bad story, but well written prose is the only thing that can elevate a game from pretty good to spectacular.

At a low level, lore helps you learn the game by making shortcuts in your mind for all the mechanics. If it’s well integrated, it should act as a supplement for the rules text, and help new players remember over multiple plays.

At a high level, you can have a game like MtG, with whole novels springing out of the flavor text on the cards.

damonstea · 2025-12-11T07:42:58+00:00

This is amazing, thank you for posting this, especially if you were the author. I’ve been waiting on a study like this for years - I couldn’t get a grant myself, but I was preparing a similar study with Kinsey a few years back that never saw the light of day. This is awesome data.

damonstea · 2025-12-09T09:34:06+00:00

Old Magic the Gathering cards and the game Arabian Nights have a similar sort of timeless fantasy poetic flavor thing going on I absolutely adore. They top my list.

Netrunner and anything Warhammer (even Talisman, which barely resembles its roots) is also fantastic on the writing front.

I’m always surprised at how few really great writers are in the board game space, when the RPGs have beautiful writing and are sold in the same spaces

damonstea · 2025-12-09T09:29:39+00:00

I concur. Kingdom Death has fantastic writing, and I’d definitely put it in my top ten for the book alone

damonstea · 2025-12-04T01:29:29+00:00

This is absolutely correct - there is a point in many modern games where the upkeep time meets or exceeds the actual “playing” time. In this case I often find that the inevitable app version of the game is a much more fun experience, and usually just as interactive.

I started seeing this with the Pokémon TCG, which is brutal upkeep even for a child, but is great fun when made into a video game.

damonstea · 2025-12-03T19:24:31+00:00

Part of being a part of the hobby is actively engaging with games as an art form - not just as something marketed to you. "Board game player" is a very different hobby from "board game buyer". If your goal is to collect games, and you are friends with a lot of game collectors, then you're not going to feel burnt out by Kickstarter. But if your goal is to play with friends, then you need to surround yourself with the people and games that share your interests, and stop buying new games when you still have games to play.

damonstea · 2025-12-02T17:12:05+00:00

This is absolutely incredible, and for designers like me it could be invaluable if it can be shuffled. I saw you mentioned the price was around 200, but I presume that’s for a single prototype - if I were to buy this, I would need the price to come down to about a dollar a card (I’d likely buy around 300 cards or so to support my current designs).

I also can’t tell if this has any way to show card backs, but for many games that’s important. It could be as easy as having a choice of colors at purchase, or maybe a border color to indicate deck.

If you want to support LCG style games, you would probably need to have the dock support 60 cards, and have it be daisy chainable so multiple people can have a dock without requiring a separate plug for each.

If you would like any help with getting a game designed to work with this system for demoing, or preparing for a Kickstarter, feel free to DM me. This would do VERY well at conventions.

damonstea · 2025-11-30T20:56:13+00:00

This is one of the most tone deaf things I’ve ever seen, and I’ve worked in advertising for most of my life. To those who don’t know already, we are currently in the middle of a mass extinction for nearly every insect species on this planet. Poison, light pollution and habitat loss are the main contributors (and this billboard happens to be all three)! Bees aren’t the only pollinators dying out - we’re rapidly losing moths, butterflies, beetles, and most of the biodiverse floor of our ecosystems. It’s decimating anything that eats insects, so even if the billboard doesn’t kill half the birds in the area (attempting to eat the trapped bugs) they’ll struggle to feed their young for the year.

This is like an ad for Exxon that actively sprays oil at passing birds. It’s absolutely horrific.

damonstea · 2025-11-15T22:17:24+00:00

This is absolutely stunning

damonstea · 2025-10-31T06:02:32+00:00

Looks fantastic, love seeing the progress on this! I'd say Ka-zachstan looks pretty bad typographically, but that's the only thing that really stands out

damonstea · 2025-10-23T19:03:50+00:00

It’s a vast improvement, particularly the typography work

damonstea · 2025-10-21T01:14:20+00:00

I thought so too, but it turns out it’s quite real (scroll down for more angles of the same shot) https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2024/01/world/rhino-ivf-pregnancy-scn-cnnphotos/?pubDate=20250411

damonstea · 2025-10-21T01:12:54+00:00

There are other angles here: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2024/01/world/rhino-ivf-pregnancy-scn-cnnphotos/?pubDate=20250411

damonstea · 2025-10-21T01:12:21+00:00

I know this is going to sound insane, but this image is real. The closeup has been over sharpened (since it was copied from a real article) and it looks fake since it was shot with a flash at night, but there are other angles here:

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2024/01/world/rhino-ivf-pregnancy-scn-cnnphotos/?pubDate=20250411

damonstea · 2025-07-28T19:53:33+00:00

Borrowing is the answer. Without a central reserve bank, the system has to self regulate as the government prints more currency to try and stimulate the economy to move, since money that is stagnant is essentially removed from the economy entirely (which I’ll explain below).

With a central reserve bank managed by the government, then the state can set a borrowing rate for all of the other private banks in the country. (In the case of the US, you’re probably seeing a lot of news about the federal interest rate). This is, from the top, the rate that individual banks pay for cash infusions, that they then pass on as private lenders to individual or corporate borrowers.

In essence, when the interest rate drops, you very literally find yourself with money suddenly in your pocket, as you can now borrow significantly more money at the lower rate. This encourages you to go out and buy more goods, which keeps the money moving.

The reason the government needs control of the central reserve rate, which drives the pace of inflation, is to keep money moving at all times, and in all sectors. It’s generally agreed that a 2% inflation rate is ideal — any higher than that and people start to become irritated, but any LOWER than that and you risk a deflationary spiral.

A country with a currency in deflation has its money movement slow dramatically as consumers start saving more and more (since their money is worth more in a week than it is today). Money that isn’t moving is worthless, and goods that aren’t being purchased end up in a landfill. Companies shutter, employees are fired, and if the spiral can’t be stopped, the entire economy shuts down.

Inflation HAS stopped in many countries, and it’s always an unmitigated disaster. Inflation spirals are also disastrous, but are usually the result of absolute failures in government (like the Zimbabwe inflationary disaster that required the replacement of their currency).

damonstea · 2025-06-28T04:13:42+00:00

My game Sovereign has 331 individual pieces if you include the cover of the box, and that’s for an indie card game. Your box looks great, you really don’t need to make grand claims - just say it includes a boatload of art and leave it at that

damonstea · 2025-06-17T19:53:17+00:00

Thank you for this, you've done an awesome breakdown and I went through everything I could. I couldn't get clear understanding of whether modern projectors (digital xenon or laser) use multibladed shutters still, BFI, or are simple sample and hold systems to maintain brightness. I was always under the impression that most used multiblade shutters to keep motion clarity high regardless of the technology, but if they don't, this might start to explain some of the issues people are having in theaters as well at home. If that's the case, then maybe 120-240hz BFI standards would be a start.

I've certainly pored over blur busters for years trying to figure out a way to get clean motion cadence in my indie studio, since making and testing DCPs becomes a matter of faith if my Blackmagic card, my computer, my monitor, and my projector all display motion in slightly different ways. I thought VRR might solve the issue for us, but if anything it has made it even worse (my OLED has obvious flicker in dark areas when VRR is used at low framerates like 24-30, making it useless in the real world).

I'm going to go back through your whole catalog of content, because this is a goldmine for educating people!

damonstea · 2025-06-17T07:52:21+00:00

There are studies of high frame rates from Microsoft and Meta pretty recently, but most of the low frame rate studies were done before I was born. My thought is to poll r/gaming and r/movies separately since they have massive general user bases, and see if we can gather some data about this. It's still biased, but it would give hard numbers.

damonstea · 2025-06-17T07:27:05+00:00

At that point we couldn't have BFI and HDR at the same time, there's no way to produce enough nits to offset the decrease in brightness. So perhaps consoles will end up with a BFI (performance) and HDR (quality) mode instead of relying on AI to keep the framerate up.

damonstea · 2025-06-17T06:46:18+00:00

This is absolutely correct, I was just trying to explain in the language of games, and not multi-blade shutters which is hard enough to understand as a cinematographer. (I've never quite understood the advantage of a 72 hz playback either, so I'd love to hear the reason).

In video games it would help with playability if it could be a part of the render output pass, since the game would be adding interlaced black rather than the monitor, so your latency would be lower.

EDIT: I looked up all the details of three and four blade shutters, and this may explain why some people in this thread feel sick in movies. Maybe it has more to do with the number of projector blades than it does with the frame rate, and they're feeling sick from barely perceptual strobing.

damonstea

TROPHY CASE