iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 01/06/2026

Can’t believe you’d mess with the designer’s perfect balancing work on this interaction

A Csikszentmihalyi flow graph annotated with a red X in the flow zone reading “Entering a password”

Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 26/04/2026

Ended up having a bit of a brainworm after seeing a cool rainbow this morning and thought it would be neat if I could make one with volumetric fog, using the antisolar point from the directional light in the scene.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 11/02/2026

This is the kind of smart, dense, mixed-use urbanism you’ll only find in Australian cities.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 20/11/2025

My talk on building open world game systems with World Partition in #UnrealEngine is finally up online! I was really worried about missing things on the day and yes I totally did, but I got most of it and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! Link to full video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=seuz...

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 07/10/2025

I have survived the consequences of my actions

A beanie-clad individual at a lectern in front of a slide titled “who am I?”

A beanie-clad individual shrugging sheepishly to camera

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 02/10/2025

As per my annual tradition, I'll be heading down to #MIGW for @gcapconf.bsky.social. I am a little bit nervous, but also excited to be delivering my first ever technical talk! It's about building open world games with World Partition in #UnrealEngine. I'll be in Melbourne all week, so come say hi!

STREAMING & SERIALISATION FOR UNREAL OPEN WORLDS

JONATHAN MOALLEM
LEAD PROGRAMMER @ GAMELOFT BRISBANE

Unreal Engine 5 provides built-in solutions for chunked streaming management, multi-user editing, instancing, and LODing with its World Partition systems. Theres a ton of great tunctionality to lean on that will get you 90% of the way to your open world game, but there's also a lot of glue and gotchas to look out for. This talk offers an overview of some of the systems and strategies we've used at Gameloft Brisbane to manage multi-platform, open world games, from schedule and world state to streaming and serialisation.

TUE 7TH OCT @3PM

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 02/09/2025

New favourite mug! Compiler Explorer knocked it out of the park with this merch.

A white and green mug featuring a cheat sheet for the x86-64 calling conventions

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 11/05/2025

I have spent this entire game being told to “touch grass” and now finally my time has arrived!

Map screen from Elden Ring highlighting Church of the Bud, Main Entrance.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 16/03/2025

We can keep this theme going. This is me at the height of my career in computing.

A small child stares longingly at an Apple IIe, tragically unaware of the lifetime of headaches a career in computing would bring.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 26/01/2025

My win for this afternoon was getting multi-mesh scene import working for GLTF files! Static mesh imports to the engine will now bake all the meshes it finds along the import node path into one mesh for the pack file. Almost makes up for skipping GGJ this year.

An application screen titled "Render Example" featuring a set of cubes and spheres floating above a grid.

A Blender viewport featuring a hierarchy of cubes and spheres alongside the scene outliner.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 03/12/2024

Months of putting off solving a rare, Windows-only scene loading bug caused by _some_ issue in the asset packer. I am reduced to numbing disappointment over THIS...

$A screenshot of a code diff: - char content[size]; + char content[size + 1]; fread(content, sizeof(char), size, file); content [size] = '\0';$

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 28/11/2024

I swear, this IS the last update to the blog site comments! To be fair, @itsjustmustafa.bsky.social baited me into doing it!

Screenshot of blog site comments using Bluesky posts with working GIFs and image embeds highlighted.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 27/11/2024

So because I cannot let anything go (and because I am still bed-bound), I ended up adding rich text facet support to the blog site. Apparently Javascript strings natively use UTF-16, and the offsets in the facets are based on UTF-8 so it wasn't as straightforward as I thought to get this working.

Screenshot of blog site comments using Bluesky posts with working user mention, hashtag, and URL links highlighted.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 26/11/2024

Something I found out today is that Bluesky has a freely available appview API. Naturally I've updated the @capscollective.com blog to use it as our blog commenting backend because this is the coolest thing ever!

Screenshot of the comments section from the Caps Collective blog site, using Bluesky replies as the comments.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 21/11/2024

Loved the set you did at Fed Square last year! It was wild walking out from Parallels and into a psychedelic nightmare haze rave.

A spooky camel horse spectre in a red haze

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 16/11/2024

Spent a bit of time today adjusting some of the editor interface on the low-poly terrain plugin for the game. Still amazes me how easy it is to build out this kind of tooling purely in script. #gamedev #godot

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 21/10/2024

And just like that, I found a peace unknown for some time now. That tempestuous bird was slain, and I felt lighter for it.

A webpage titled "Deactivated" followed by "Your account is deactivated" and "Sorry to see you go. #GoodBye".

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 19/10/2024

So, update on that solitaire game I was making for my partner’s birthday. It’s done. And they loved it! Even managed to get a little stats and achievements menu in! I’ve exported to WASM here: jonjondev.com/solitaire/ #gamedev #indiedev

A webpage with a game of solitaire shown, overlayed with a statistics and history menu for win count.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 22/09/2024

My partner plays A LOT of solitaire, so the other night I decided to throw together one of my own for them to play. I am once again reminded how fun and easy it is to doodle in Godot, but if feel I’m about to fall down a rabbit hole on solvability rates and leniency mechanics. #gamedev #indiedev

A Godot Engine game window featuring a solitaire game in progress.

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 13/07/2024

*order of events is representative only, the particular punishment of your villain may differ

The villain being flattened by a steam roller from Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 07/02/2024

Hi, #gamedev, I’m a gameplay engineer living up in Brisbane, Australia! I’m also part of the @capscollective.com team, having released Fantasy Town Regional Manager, a satirical town-builder. I'll post some combination of goofs and dev stuff for the things we're working on in Godot, Unreal, and C++

Me and the Caps Collective team all dolled up for the Australian Game Developer Awards (AGDAs).

A gameplay screenshot from Fantasy Town Regional Manager (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1524530/).

A character standing in a desert with a small robot friend for a digital band, Big Sand. Two definitely-not-whitebox cubes loom threateningly in the background.

A cube on a green surface in our custom game engine, Siege, with text reading "Successfully loaded collide.scene".

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 14/01/2024

Spent my week putting together this little little low-poly terrain plugin for Godot. Pretty happy with how it came out and I'm surprised how good the plugin support is at the GDScript level!

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 21/10/2023

Watching The Roar vs Sydney game at Ballymore was a ton of fun. Bit conflicted about my allegiances, but definitely coming back for the next home game!

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Jonathan Moallem @jonjondev.com · 05/10/2023

Snuck into PAXAus show floor last night and took snaps of the most fun looking PAX Rising indie booths. I can’t make it today but someone please let me know how GAY DRACULA game is.

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