iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This still isn't plotting, but it IS generating strings of text that look like what a human would type if they were plotting! Which of course is exactly and entirely what an LLM is capable of

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

If you do this consistently, picking which issues are important to you rather than treating every minute decision as equally critical, then people will listen more when you do speak up.

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Sometimes, the best thing you can do to help the game become the best it can be, is to provide your feedback and then step back and let someone else decide what to do with it.

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

When the culture is "everyone collaborates and contributes to decisions", it can be easy for that to become "everyone has to agree on every decision" - the dreaded design by committee, or worse(?), the total deadlock.

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

What I think flies under the radar, but can be just as damaging - especially in highly collaborative small teams, like you often find in indie games - is when those collaborators won't let EACH OTHER make decisions.

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This definitely means "bosses need to learn to delegate", but I think that's a pretty cold take. It's abundantly obvious when a boss is too in-the-weeds instead of providing direction and trusting their ICs to make nitty gritty decisions.

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

An underrated gamedev skill is letting someone else make a decision.

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Using windows definitely supports ms though? Just like using unity supports unity and using steam supports valve and using unreal certainly supports epic

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Reposted by Matthew Rowland

Draknek & Friends @draknek.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Reminder: Spooky Express is OUT NOW! 🚂🧟🧛 Take charge of the only rail service willing to carry the undead passengers of deepest, darkest Trainsylvania. Steam: s.team/a/3352310 itch: draknek.itch.io/spooky-express iOS: apps.apple.com/app/id673842... Android: play.google.com/store/apps/d...

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

It's been a while since I played HK, but isn't this how healing worked in the original? Your Soul bar replenished from hitting enemies and you could heal as long as you had one full Soul?

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

It was a nice surprise however that the BOTW and TOTK upgrades are included with Switch Online sub - not sure if this was announced previously and I missed it but I was fully expecting to have to buy em

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Go back Malys!! Support this amazing team taking big interesting swings!! Also go play/review Stray Gods if you haven't already!

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

LOL yes ok. Big "elite mobs in the Maw playing canned animations while standing around waiting for adventurers to come kill them" energy

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Is this a me issue or a you issue? This warning seems to be stopping me from clicking Continue to Payment

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

I am 100% definitely in for a bundle pre-order! I will float past my friends to see if any of them would commit too

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

It's ok, you know how to get up em if they are

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

And, for the purposes of this law, specifically the word "adaptability", I think that puts NNs into a different (different! not better!) class of software that should be able to be separated and targeted by the law

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

I do not buy into AI hype, and I have at least a working approximation of how NNs work. By "black box" I only meant that a human can't reasonably look at what's going on in there and understand how it reached its outputs.

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Maybe what I meant by my statements wasn't clear - I'm not suggesting that NNs are better than procgen, or that NNs are good (for generating strings of text OR anything else), or that it being a "black box" is some kind of good/magical/desirable quality.

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

It's entirely possible the law doesn't capture that nuance, but I'd agree with you that it's far more likely that the law doesn't actually hit ANY existing software than that it actually hits all games etc

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

You can't just chuck a bunch of new training data at Spelunky's level generator and have it suddenly spit out a Metroidvania map; you CAN just chuck a bunch of new training data at an LLM and have a new bot that is specialised at producing strings of text for a certain purpose

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Depends how you define "what they were programmed to do" - yeah none of them are doing anything other than "generate strings of text"; but the means by which they generate the text is a black box that has adapted beyond the original programming in ways that (eg.) procgen game levels have not

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Since they haven't provided a definition of adaptiveness, I'd think it'd fall back to a dictionary definition of "the ability to change or modify to suit a different purpose, environment, or conditions" - the system isn't doing that in any non-ML games/software

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Wouldn't adaptiveness be the ability to do something that it wasn't explicitly programmed to do? eg. the "learning" part of ML?

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

I'd read the "may exhibit adaptiveness" line as: in order to qualify as an AI system, you must be able to say that it "may exhibit adaptiveness", rather than that "exhibiting adaptiveness" is optional. There's no way that MS Paint or a regular video game can exhibit adaptiveness. But of course IANAL

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

What level of investment do the dead have in living affairs? Would you have Tywin Lannister types continuing to run their family from beyond the grave, or does death inherently grant a kind of separation from the cares of mortals?

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

I think there are a few follow-up questions that might make wildly different versions of this - eg what kind of leverage (if any) can be used against the dead? Can the dead be "killed" again (removed from the communicable afterlife), or experience pain? Can anyone block access to specific ghosts?

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

Oh shit they're doing ancient Rome? And somehow I missed this news??

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Reposted by Matthew Rowland

Steven ter Heide @steventerheide.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

I summarized some of my learnings on testing and feedback in two pages.

Page with tip about how to interpret feedback

Page with tip on how to organize play tests

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

I'd post a link to this if someone asked me to "show me a skeet that makes you think of Joe" though

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Reposted by Matthew Rowland

Joshua Boggs @jboggsie.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

After a year that felt like shuffling a bad hand, we finally revealed gameplay for @sleightofhand.game at @dayofthedevs.org ! It’s Metal Gear Solid meets Dishonored, but with a twist: your deck of cards is your set of powers. 🃏 Wishlist here! 👇 store.steampowered.com/app/2857810/...

store.steampowered.com

Sleight of Hand on Steam

Infiltrate a hardboiled, rain-slicked city of taboo, where ritual magic and cursed artefacts set apart those with power from those without. Sleight of Hand is a 3rd-person Stealth Action Card-Sim abou...

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Reposted by Matthew Rowland

Cara Ellison @caraellison.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Hey check out the Sleight of Hand in here that’s nice

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Yep, as I said in a different reply, I'm sure there are other savings to come from a UBI system that keeps people off the street, just that this trial / article don't make any claims about those bsky.app/profile/conu...

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

But unfortunately this trial (or at least, this article) doesn't make any comment about that aspect of the system one way or another

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

The compelling argument about UBI to me is that it's cheaper AND less dehumanising to just give it to everyone rather than doing means testing and proof-of-looking-for-work and all the other faff that goes into "preventing exploitation" of existing welfare systems

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

For two, the control group who only received a token $50/month had the same outcomes as the two trial groups, suggesting the money wasn't the primary cause for the positive outcomes. If anyone wants to read the full article, you can bypass the paywall using archive.is : archive.is/ewXRD#select...

archive.is

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

I'm a big supporter of UBI programs, but the outcomes here are (unfortunately) not nearly as clear-cut as you're presenting. For one, the savings of $589k are calculated BEFORE accounting for the ~$9.4 million cost of the program.

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Brimstone - Super Battle Golf - Out now! @brimstone.games · 21/11/2024

👑 Overthrown officially launches into early access on PC & Xbox on December 5th! Throw some stuff, grief your friends, do some crime!

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

that's a 1 in 20,000 pack LOL anyway I sent you a friend request, I'm Conundrum :D

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

what the FUCK Ben, do you know how rare that is

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Matthew Rowland @conundrum.bsky.social · 05/10/2023

I couldn't recommend working with Max more highly!

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