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Ben Britten

@benbritten.bsky.social
1.2K followers 2K following 820 posts

Previously worked on many, many games; gamedev for nearly 20 years. I am old. I post random 3d printing stuff and sometimes bunnies. He/Him. Australia. Also birds apparently.

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Reposted by Ben Britten
Jason Gorman @jasongorman.bsky.social · 13h
I think there's a good case to be made that folks using LLMs to do things they already have tools for that are quicker, more reliable and require many orders of magnitude less compute have lost the plot. See also: prompts for code that are longer than that code.
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 11h
Did not get too much time to work on the #godot prototype today but still managed to do some small tweaks. lighting: I changed the function that calculated the wall glow from distance to be a proper easing function with some adjustment available so I could adjust it and make it a bit less gloomy.
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 13h
Per my last email...
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 17h
this would only be a problem if the AI was trained on a massive corpus of media that was systemically biased against minorities, women, LGBTQ+ folk, etc... uh oh.
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Makkon @makkon.bsky.social · 19h
I'm immensely proud to announce that my texture library that's been in the making for nearly a decade is now available on my itchio store for indie devs to purchase commercial licenses. makkon.itch.io
screenshot of my itchio store, showing several texture packs available for purchse
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
More tweaks on my #godot roguey-likey-blockey-breaky prototype. Now that my lighting is 'done' (lol) I will proceed to tweak the shit out of it forever. First up: fix the corners! The algos to calc the visible walls always leave out corners because they are technically not visible! Boo! Bad corners!
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it's nate! @natescape.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Do you know how much has to have gone wrong for me to not like the internet
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Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 28/09/2026
2. you'd have to be a huge fucking idiot to hand all of your work to some startup who is in the mass data harvesting business but pinky promises they won't steal your data. 3. a lot of people with advanced degrees seem to be huge fucking idiots
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Aftermath @aftermath.site · 28/09/2026
These AI companies should be responsible for everything they do, and they fact nobody is holding them accountable is driving me insane: aftermath.site/ai-agents-resp...
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Guardian Australia @australia.theguardian.com · 28/09/2026
Oh no Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unpopular! Surely it must all be over soon | First Dog on the Moon
theguardian.com
Oh no Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unpopular! Surely it must all be over soon | First Dog on the Moon
It’s so bad some Republicans are even turning against him – bit late guys but whatever * Sign up here to get an email whenever First Dog cartoons are published * Get all your needs met at the First Dog shop if what you need is First Dog merchandise and prints Continue reading...
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Turns out adding lights to a tileMapLayer in #godot is easy! Just add a PointLight2D and then set the tile occlusion in the same way you set collision. easy peasy. The problem of course is that the occluded tiles are in their own shadow. Makes for a very stylized look, but a bit hard to see. 🧵
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
gonna repost that last one with better videos 😬 sorry to whomever just liked it as i deleted it!
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
weird. The companies who built their technology entirely on stolen IP are stealing any IP you hand to them. I hope nobody has done anything stupid like letting Claude code look at their entire codebase, or given it access to any trade secrets or proprietary databases!
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
the Turing test has never been an actual test for machine intelligence, but it is an excellent indicator of human gullibility and stupidity.
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Jason Gorman @jasongorman.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Reliable long-horizon autonomous agent workflows are science fiction.
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Delaney King (She/Her/Whomst) @delaneyking.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Quick games design lesson: Consider your spaces in terms of points of interaction. (Think consoles, NPCS to talk, item storage or pickups). Here I have three POI placed in a convoluted space. Lets see how a player interacts with them...
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Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
This is the trailer that all the major platforms refuse to run as a paid ad:
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 24/09/2026
over the past few weeks several AI evaluation/cybersecurity experts have explained how what's happening is a result of human incompetence rather than "AI going rogue". I'm begging the media to show a shred of journalistic integrity and stop parroting what altman or amodei say
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"we built a bomb, then put that bomb in a plane, then dropped it. And then some time later it blew up buildings and killed people _without any human involvement_, nobody can be blamed for this tragic accident"
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 25/09/2026
an ai system doesn't have a will, intention or feelings. nor the capacity to want or care. a neural network does not go rogue, escape, or rebel. just tech bros' narratives projected onto machines. and pls, don't mansplain my post to me
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Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos.com · 24/09/2026
Aaron Swartz is no longer here to tell us what he saw like twenty years ago. futurism.com/artificial-i...
Swartz had been batchmates with Altman in the inaugural class of 2005 at the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, and warned his friends about Altman shortly before his passing.

“You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one confidante. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
And here is a finished level. Finished in as much as it has both walls and floors I guess. there is nothing else in it 😅
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
One thing that will happen when you are doing this sort of procgen for levels is that you can get disconnected areas. They are mostly harmless, but will cause problems in some extreme cases. The solution is to do a validation pass* using a floodfill algo.and prune any unconnected areas. #godot 🧵
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ok, now that I have added arbitrary base shapes to my level procgen, I can finally do what I have set out to do: make every level vaguely mitten-shaped. As a player you probably would not even notice, but I will know it is there! Totally worth two days of extra dev 😅 #godot
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
can we please stop saying that the AI did this without prompting? a person set this in motion. The process had access to tokens, and someone approved that as well. the fact that they did not know what the process was going to do does not remove culpability, it actually makes it worse!
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
New day, new tweaks to the procgen for my roguey-likey-blocky-breaky game prototype. I changed it so that it no longer just uses rectangles and can use any arbitrary collection of contiguous points. Here I am just using primitives but it can generate a map inside any cloud of points really. #godot
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Eniko Fox @enikofox.com · 23/09/2026
The code they write is dogshit. It's automated technical debt with built in landmines. You think people coding in C causes issues? Wait'll you see what LLM code produced on massive scale does.
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
My gaunt-like is sorta evolving into a roguelike+ block breaker (rogue breaker?) so I need some procgen. Got my room generator and my maze generator (next post)! just gotta combine them now. #godot
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I have seen this link a few times recently, and finally got to take a look. Its 10 years old; talks about 'superintelligence' and why that idea is so popular among 'smart people'. It is very prescient, and also relevant to the recent 'rationalist' sex cult discourse. idlewords.com/talks/superi...
idlewords.com
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
This is a bit of a paradox: The only parts of the game I dont care about would be ones made by AI. If I dont care about em; I would cut them. So then there would be no parts of the game I dont care about. And by the transitive property of slop: if you use AI in your game, then I do not care for it.
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Chris Person @papapishu.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Oh so they’re coming for everything huh
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
what if my gauntlet-like (gauntlike?) was actually a block breaker (which is where this art is from anyway) 🤔 Feels like a weird vampire survivors vibe. Maybe even Diablo-ish, (Diablocko?)
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Jason Gorman @jasongorman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
BREAKING NEWS: The 1984 Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy text-based adventure game has escaped and is hacking into competitors' systems via interpreters and tools that we built specifically to hack into competitors' systems, after we instructed it to hack into competitors' systems.
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TheBossRoss 🧶 @thebossross.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Women knew it. Research proved it. 😉 "The answers were unambiguous: self-centred men who are argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable and unempathetic are much more likely to own a high-status car such as an Audi, BMW or Mercedes."
helsinki.fi
The fast and the furious: Research shows that owners of high-status cars are on a collision course with traffic | University of Helsinki
Why do BMW and Audi owners often seem to drive like idiots? Is it the car that makes them behave aggressively behind the wheel, or are specific types of people drawn to such cars as well being more li...
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Nathan C @elprezau.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
This is my shocked face.
futurism.com
"Slop Grenades": Shopify CEO Who Pushed Staff to Use AI Is Now Horrified by What He's Wrought
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke is getting a first-hand look at the AI-workplace revolution, and it isn't a pretty sight.
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David Fox💙🫘🇺🇦 @davidbfox.com · 21/09/2026
First Thimbleweed Park 2 podcast and first new podcast in six years! Do we sound rusty? blog2.thimbleweedpark.com/twp2-podcast... #gamedev
blog2.thimbleweedpark.com
Thimbleweed Park 2 Podcast 1
Follow Thimbleweed Park 2's development
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Just gonna light this bag of dogshit on fire and walk away from the doorstep, but the people in media I hear saying AI has made them "more productive" appear to be producing less than ever, and worse things than ever. I wonder if they can even tell.
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Max! @littlepolygon.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Real pet peeve for podcasters saying "well programmers tell me LLMs are useful for coding" because it fundamentally misunderstands what "coding" is. It's the result of a process of problem-solving, and when one-shotted produces artifacts without solutions.
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Megan Fox @glassbottommeg.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Oh lol. You know that Steam AI Festival? Yeah Valve uh, wasn't really involved. It never got featured. (if you didn't know, devs and pubs can put together our own features, but mostly Valve just shrugs, you have to ask / get lucky / etc to get any vis on em) hitbydesign.substack.com/p/steam-ai-g...
hitbydesign.substack.com
The Steam AI Gaming Festival nobody asked for
And it’s actually worse than it looks
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Jason Gorman @jasongorman.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The slide in today's Code Craft & AI workshop module that kills your agentic dreams.
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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
if you study hard and become good at any given craft, you'll eventually see success unless, of course, it's 2026, and you're on the worst timeline terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a...
terrytao.wordpress.com
A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
this is 100% my kind of bullshit. love it. very tempted to buy one to play with, but I already have too many machines around the house 😬
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
LLMs are not dangerous because of AGI or it becoming Skynet or anything like that, it won't and cannot. It is dangerous because people in power don't understand what it is, they believe the Silicon Valley press releases. They are going to use it in deeply stupid ways. This is the actual danger.
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andy™ @andylevy.net · 08/09/2026
werner herzog on AI filmmaking (from here www.indiewire.com/features/int...)
Q: A couple years ago at IDFA, I saw this movie "About a Hero," which is this partly Al-generated hybrid documentary that tries to recreate the atmosphere of your films.

A: The intention of this young filmmaker was never to remake any [of my films], but making something in the spirit. And I immediately said, "You will fail. It is such a stupid idea. It's phenomenally, abysmally stupid. I will not take part in it." He wanted me to explain things and have my voice in it.
I said, "You are alone. There's such a thing as free speech, which I respect. So go ahead and fail." And it is a failure, period.
It's so standardized that Al can step in because there's not real storytelling. It's mimicry of something that has happened before. And I welcome Al to replace all the idiots who are into nothing but repeating, repeating, repeating until it's ad nauseam.
When it's ad nauseam, please, please, please let Al step in and do the job.
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Adam Lomax @adamlomax.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I found great use from Starter Packs so I thought I'd put my own together! It's basically a bunch of people who post their #gamedev progress for whatever they are working on. I find it incredibly inspirational! I tried to not have any a/i in it so let me know if there is. go.bsky.app/4mLnBDY
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Workin on the #godot prototype so I can learn godot: Today I bodged together some very placeholder overworld tiles so I can have my starting area be 'outside' the dungeon. I also added baddies who currently just sit there and get murdered and then vanish. But all the systems work, so that is good.
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Is it smarter than techbros? because that is NOT a high bar. Also: no, it is not AGI. FFS people.
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I decided my #godot prototype needed a name and a paper-thin story. You have to venture into the dungeon and retrieve the Mitten of Yendor. So that is happening.
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Random Coffee Take: For people who want to stop ordering americanos and don't want to say 'canadiano' or similar, just start ordering long blacks. They are very similar, but better IMHO. (no affiliation with this site, just came up in a search 😀) espressooutlet.com/blogs/news/a...
espressooutlet.com
Americano vs Long Black: Same Ingredients, Different Coffee?
Learn how Americanos and long blacks differ in preparation order, crema, concentration, serving style, and how to improve each drink at home.
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Ben Britten @benbritten.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
this is excellent
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