iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 09/09/2026

Absolute cracker of a text to get from the wife, best day of the year

A text saying “I’ve just bought the first mince pies of the season”

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 24/08/2026

This is me at Gamescom dev today. If you want to chat ping me here or automatedaf.dev/gamescom!

Me in a blue tee with a layered shirt and a dark blue baseball hat

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 10/08/2026

Orleanists: want a Parisian who descends from the last king of France, King Louis Phillipe. So called because this guy is the head of the house of Orleans. Good head for a king, actually French, not related to the loser of waterloo. If I had to pick, I might be an Orleanist too.

Prince Jean Carl Pierre Marie d'Orléans, Count of Paris

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 10/08/2026

Bonapartists: “napoleon bonaparte” exists and he’s married to the aristocracy in Austria. But why the descendant of a despotic general is a good idea is beyond me. ❌

Jean-Christophe Louis Ferdinand Albéric Napoléon de Bonaparte

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 10/08/2026

I’ve now read too much Wikipedia about the competing lines for the vacant French throne: Legitimatists: their guy is literally a Spaniard living in Spain, get a grip. Plus, Phillip II literally gave up his claim in the treaty of Utrecht. ❌ He does look very Kingy though.

Louis de Bourbon, Duc d'Anjou, Successeur des Rois de France

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 09/08/2026

Wait the picture he showed us was not *this* guy, the current head of the house of Orléans. I think our American friend (who kept saying Orr-lee-anns instead of Orh-le-ahn) got duped by a smart French kid in a nice suit

Jean, count of Paris. Very aristocracy, much blue blood. Also super old.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 08/08/2026

This is spectacular on the real problems with games industry budgets and project length. www.productionalchemist.com/p/inever-see...

“This is the part that gets missed when a studio measures its AI deployment. The measurement is almost always taken at the task level, where the tool is doing its job perfectly well. Concept iterations per week went up. Time to first playable audio went down. Every one of those numbers can improve while the total cost of the project rises, **because the numbers describe the cheap part of the system and say nothing about the expensive part.**” (emphasis mine)

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 16/07/2026

If the astrologers are correct, there’s about six hours until this big stick knocks the hot ball from the sky and we can finally relax. Join me in giving praise to the stick. All hail the stick, bringer of darkness.

The Brighton 360 pole, against a blue sky and a flaming hot sun

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 14/07/2026

I guess that’s why they call it BRIGHTon Say hi if you’re at develop too!

A selfie of me, on the Brighton beach. The burnt out pier is behind. I’m wearing a cap, shades, a tee and a short sleeved shirt.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 17/06/2026

Held the photo up to the bins when I got home, it’s a little better

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 17/06/2026

If you’re wondering what the bright star next to the moon is, it’s Jupiter

A crescent moon over houses, low to the horizon. To the top right of it is a bright dot.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 11/06/2026

forgive the very linkedin-coded post, but I'll be at @developconference.com in brighton, and if you want to chat about how I help developers improve their shipping experience through automatedaf.dev, dm me!

the dominoes meme, with the small domino being "chat to andrew at develop" and the biggest one being "faster iteration, empowered QA, stable builds"

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 03/06/2026

oh look wait I found out how to turn it off

there's a small "Turn off auto-capitalise" button!

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 03/06/2026

this is far from the biggest deal in the world, but Develop Brighton's registration page will automatically Capital Case words. I hope no-one from XBOX is attending!

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 13/05/2026

my post that did the biggest numbers in the old place was ironically talking about how the numbers should be smaller

A tweet:
The PS2 Manifesto
- 7-13 hours of content
- Combine a few old ideas in a new way, or have one big new idea
- no complicated character upgrade trees
- limited online, little post-launch support
- 2 ish years, 30 game devs
- thanks for your money, on to the next one

Retweeting a gi.biz post about 95% of studios working on a live service game.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 19/04/2026

Unreal has a commandlet to run data validation against your assets, which is great for CI. If you need to _exclude_ some assets from validation, you can add the below to DefaultEditor.ini. This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere! Luckily I read asset validation pipelines for fun. #unrealtips

[/Script/DataValidation.EditorValidatorSubsystem]
+ExcludedDirectories=(Path="/Game/Developers/")
+ExcludedDirectories=(Path="/Game/ThirdPartyContent/")
+ExcludedDirectories=(Path="/Game/WIP/")

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 29/03/2026

The musical kids got their elpheba sex cardigan. Now the space nerds get their grace science cardigan. The people crave cosy knitwear.

Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary. He’s wearing a heavy knit Scandinavian (?) cardigan, creamy white with a knitted red Rudolph motif.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 22/03/2026

I still suspect that the white ring lock-on from dark souls was programmer art. It’s so incongruous with the rest of the UI.

A screenshot of dark souls, a third person action game. In the near distance an enemy has a pure white ring over them, indicating you can strafe around them

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 16/03/2026

Forgive me for LinkedIning on main, but proud to be adding another GDC speaker’s badge to the pile, and looking forward to a week of bone-melting jetlag

Ten GDC speakers badges going back to 2013, speaker badges from various other confs on three continents

Oh no min the cat, a calico, is getting in the way of the shot. I’m stroking her head.

Min’s face, pink nose, white fur, black and brown above the eyes. Speaker badges in the background.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 14/03/2026

My flight home from GDC is not until the evening, so I just uber’d to Baker Beach, then walked up under the Golden Gate Bridge, across crissy field, to fisherman’s wharf and a well-deserved in-and-out burger

Bakers beach in the foreground, the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. Deep blue skies.

Further up the coast, lots of greenery and the bridge looming

The maritime museum and the ghirardeli sign: very art deco

The in and out burger sign, very retro fifties

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 11/03/2026

The Sony car is outside my hotel window I guess

The Sony/honda afeela, shot from above, at the end of an ally

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 09/03/2026

Getting a Mel’s out of the way early in the week, so I don’t have to worry about it later

A mel’s booth, very retro, a jukebox on the wall

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 09/03/2026

Getting a Mel’s out of the way early in the week, so I don’t have to worry about it later

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 09/03/2026

So begins mission Stay Awake For At Least A Bit

A red ale and the book In Ascension by Martin macinnes, on a red wooden bar

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 17/01/2026

This weekend is the last for subbing a talk to Qualicon! This is a great virtual conf focused on quality and games, and there's a track just for automation. The submission is only 300 words! I'd love to hear about your scrappy-yet-effective automation solutions. gamequality.org/qualicon/202...

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 15/01/2026

The axis cube and the ghost cube are other great examples! Both of these are 3x3!

A ghost cube that does not look like a cube

The ghost cube is silver but mostly just looks like a polygon soup

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 12/01/2026

working with a US client, figured I'd try to add a world clock to the win11 widgets. nope, nothing there. the clock app has a world clock! and you can Pin To Start! ah that must be useful! ...why. who designed this. what happened.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 31/12/2025

StoryGraph’s summary stuff is half-broken but here’s all this year’s books. Wolf Hall is an instant all-timer; have been gorging on the third over the Christmas break. 26 books is even with last year, I think that’s about my level after three or four years of linear increases.

26 books including Talented Mr Ripley twice (a bug), two of the wolf hall trilogy, handmaid’s tale, the first two hyperions and the last of the scholomance trilogy

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 23/12/2025

The most important bin in my Lego organiser is the “bits that can pass for wings” bin

Lego triangles and truncated triangle panels of various colours. More Lego is in the background.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 12/12/2025

I wondered why one of my fave @puzzmo.com puzzles, Wordbind, never left Experimental, and then they announced they were sunsetting it. Turns out the reason wasn't that it was unpopular or buggy - they just ran out of unique puzzles! There's no scale to it for a daily site like puzzmo. Interesting!

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 25/11/2025

Trying to explain to kiddo that last night I watched Jonny Greenwood sit on the floor for five minutes playing with knobs on his pedals and it was excellent actually

A circular stage, bathed in purple light. It’s from quite high up, so the band are small. Above the stage on a suspended screen you can see thom yorke singing while playing guitar.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 14/11/2025

give me a time machine and on the way back from killing hitler I'm going back to make joachaim put these in unity 1

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 10/11/2025

Unity Build Automation is going to start including Mac builds on the free tier, and an increase in storage from 5 to 25gb. UBA remains slow but I’d rather you use this than nothing, and these are great changes.

Unity email outlining an inclusion of 100 mac minutes on top of the 200 windows minutes for build automation. And an increase from 5gb to 25gb. “Changes to go into effect by end of Q1”

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 04/11/2025

Some days are good days and then some days your wife phones to say she’s in the secondhand bookshop and found a mint condition 600 pager full of Tudor political intrigue

The spine of The Mirror And The Light, held in my hand so you can see how thick this boy is

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 31/10/2025

Did you build server fail this week? Why not? A week were your build server was 100% green is a week where either it failed to catch some bugs or no-one did any work

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 23/10/2025

I know I'm mostly preaching to the choir here, but QA _is_ part of your team, and you should treat them like it. the same way you'd focus on the workflow of your level designers so they can do their best work, you should focus on your QA and make sure they have all the tools they need to succeed.🧵

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 18/10/2025

This chungus isn’t going to slip down the back of my sofa, Microsoft

Windows 11 install, asking if I want to turn on Find My Device, in case I lose it

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 18/10/2025

The new pc is enormous. I just picked it based on specs and price, didn’t look close enough. I have no idea why my AIO has a screen, and it’ll be facing the left-hand wall anyway 🤷

A huge monster of a pc case. A more normal sized gaming pc from eight years ago is in the background.

Lots of rgb gamer lights through the enormous window of the new pc case

There’s a screen on this AIO block. It’s showing some animated curvy lines right now.

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 18/10/2025

The little seat and chair are so babs can sit and pretend to work

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Andrew Fray Helps Automate Video Games @andrewfray.dev · 14/10/2025

Not annoyed by this post but I think it’s a common sentiment: build servers are only for AAA. That doesn’t have to be true! I do fractional build engineering. I can get something simple set up for you very fast for a fixed cost. No one should be without a daily build!

A post that says, “things I miss being indie indie vs AAA:

Build machines and automated builds.

I was not grateful enough to all the build engineers I worked with and I apologize”

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