And just this last week we submitted our first game to the client! I learned a lot along the way and it was a blast.

Thankfully I’m not brand new to game development

Like I said, I’ve always been into game development and have done a bunch of random stuff related to it over the years. Mapping, modding, messing with fantasy consoles, and I’ve even helped out a little bit on an unreleased Unreal Engine game. But this last project feels like a milestone because it was my first time doing anything professional in the space.

My brother and I teamed up which was perfect. He’s way more experienced than I with 3D asset production, and I was able to bring some programming experience.

Godot is an awesome tool

The game we just finished was my first time doing anything serious with the Godot game engine. I have to say I’m a fan now. Granted, this game was really small in scope but I think that’s part of why Godot was such a good fit for us. Its documentation is excellent and in general it’s really quite approachable and easy to learn. It’s just a joy to work with. Certainly much more so than Unity or Unreal.

We used Godot’s scripting language, GDScript, out of necessity because of our target platform. But even if we’d had the choice available I think GDScript would’ve still been the best option for us. Syntactically it seems to draw most of its inspiration from Python, which made it pretty easy to dive into. Overall, I haven’t had many complaints with GDScript’s feature set. I am curious now how developing in C# with Godot would feel, though I definitely haven’t felt the need to yet.

I could really see myself making a personal project in Godot at some point, especially now that I’m familiar with it.

Keep in mind that my experience with Godot is still a bit limited and really tilted towards the programming side of things. But if you’re looking to start a new game project, I’d say it’s worth your time no matter your skill level. I’d love to hear about your experience with Godot if you’ve used it before, good or bad.

Doing something I enjoy

The last thing I’ll say here is that it’s been a really nice change of pace getting paid to do something I enjoy. Even though this project has been coming out of my free time, it’s felt exciting just like any other of my side projects. Never overwhelming or tiring.

I’m definitely looking forward to doing more game dev stuff in the future now that I’ve gotten a real taste of it.

— JP

Skate Story website

I stay fairly up to date with games that are coming out, though it’s pretty rarely that I actually play them brand new. So when I say I bought Skate Story on day one after playing the demo, that’s high praise because that never happens. And I’m glad I did since it turned into my favorite game of 2025.

Shortly put, Skate Story is one of the most stylish games I’ve played in a while. In every aspect. Visuals, music, gameplay. It nails everything while also managing to be really unique.

The skateboarding mechanics feel a bit reminiscent of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, though more grounded and with some extra elements like bonuses for well-timed tricks. It’s approachable and forgiving, but also tricky enough that it’s really rewarding when you get it just right.

Add the slick visuals and banger soundtrack into the mix and Skate Story is just one of the coolest feeling games I’ve ever played.

Speaking of the soundtrack, I’ve been listening to it all the time ever since I started the game. It’s a vibe, and a super memorable one.

There’s a few more 2025 releases I plan on getting to eventually (like Dispatch), but Skate Story has so much of what I love in a game that it has to be my game of the year.

By the way, if you’ve played Skate Story and are looking for something similar then you might want to take a look at Kitten Burst. I wrote about it in 2024 and certain things about Skate Story reminded me of it which doesn’t often happen. They’re pretty different games, but they’re both movement focused and have similar feels. I have a hunch that someone who enjoys one will enjoy the other.

— JP

I first tried out Helix several years ago before I even gave Neovim a real shot. I’ve seen a few posts pop up about Helix this past week, so I had the idea to ditch Neovim and give it another go.

• Julia Evans: Notes on switching to Helix from vim
• Artem Golubin: How I’m using Helix editor

To give some context, my use case for terminal text editors is mostly just writing posts for the blog or editing config files. Nothing too complicated. These days if I’m writing code I’m usually firing up VS Code. It’s just easy to use and is well supported.

So far I’ve written this post and my last one using Helix. I really appreciate that Helix tries to include a lot of modern functionality without relying on plugins. Maintaining my config and plugin list was by far my least favorite thing about Neovim. Helix’s config is much more straightforward and there’s less of it. Not to mention it’s probably a good thing security-wise to not be depending on dozens of plugins.

One thing that concerns me though is that Helix’s keybindings are similar but not at all identical to Vim’s. It’s just enough to mess with your muscle memory. I do get the feeling that Helix’s bindings are technically better, but the thing with Vim is that you can’t escape it. Chances are it’s already installed on any system you’ll need to do work on. Time will tell if my Helix muscle memory will be a problem next time I need to do something with Vim.

I registered for a Blood Bowl tournament

A group of friends is putting on a Blood Bowl tournament (think Warhammer + American Football) so I decided to join in. I’ve only ever played half a game so I expect I’ll be leaning pretty heavily on pure luck. My team of Dwarves will hopefully at least make sure I don’t go down without a fight! I’m hoping to get at least one more practice game in before we officially start.

I finished Breaking Bad

The last season of Breaking Bad went by more quickly than just about any other season of TV I’ve watched. We were watching three episodes some nights and it was hard to even limit it to that. Overall it’s just a great show and it’s been a thrill throughout. Plenty of interesting characters and developments.

We also watched El Camino, a movie that follows one of the main characters immediately after the events of the show. That one’s also great. It leaves things in a good spot and pretty much feels like a long episode of the show which are both things that I was hoping for.

Of course the plan now is to start Better Call Saul pretty soon. Some people I’ve talked with actually like it better than the original show so I’m excited. Of course, I’d be looking forward to it anyway just being familiar now with some of the characters it follows.

— JP

Learning Typescript with a new project

I started a new web-based fediverse-related programming project recently. It’s nothing too serious right now and is mostly an excuse to have something to work on with my work being pretty unfulfilling these days. Still, I’m enjoying it and hoping I can get far enough along on it to eventually release it.

Very early on into the project I decided to migrate what I had to Typescript and I’m super glad I did. Learning something new is half the fun of a hobby project, and so far I’m really appreciating the ergonomics of working in Typescript. The most obvious improvement I’ve noticed is that my IDE is a lot smarter now and is able to give hints based on types like you’d expect from any typed language.

The guts of the project are pretty much there, so what I have ahead of me now is mostly front-end design and logic. Not my favorite stuff in the world, but I at least like to imagine I’m decent at it. I mean, have you seen what passes as production-ready from billion dollar companies these days? The bar’s not very high.

My new vinyl collection

I got a nice record player for my birthday a few weeks back and have since started a small vinyl collection.

My favorite part of the collection so far is the soundtrack for the Outer Wilds DLC Echoes of the Eye. It’s really neat how much care was put into the entire package, and there’s even a few Easter eggs between the artwork and the vinyl itself. Not to mention of course just how cool of a soundtrack Echoes of the Eye has.

Lord of the Rings is still incredible

I just finished yet another watch of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’ve said it before, but I really do think these are movies that people will still be watching 50 years from now. They’ve barely aged a day since they were made and every re-watch is just as rewarding as the first.

Having fun in a not good game

I started playing a bit of the new game in the Skate series, obnoxiously stylized as “skate.”. And I have some thoughts.

Is it a good game? No. The whole thing reeks of bland corporate appropriation of skate culture, and it seeps into everything from the level design to the voice overs which are so painful that one of the first things you’ll do is turn them off.

But is it a fun game? Actually, yeah. The standout feature right now is the sandbox nature of the game since you’ll see everything the missions have to throw at you within the first couple hours. I’ve been enjoying finding my own crazy lines and stunts to try to perfect, and it’s really neat watching everyone else in the servers do the same and getting ideas from them. Grab a few friends and I think it’s a pretty guaranteed way of making a few hours fly by, and the game is free so there’s not a whole lot to lose.

The future of week notes

I’ve never really tried to stick to a set schedule in the past with week notes. I’ve always looked at it more as a way to record shorter thoughts together that probably don’t deserve their own individual posts, but which are still interesting enough to me that I want to write something about them.

And aside from that, it’s just a format that I really enjoy and want to see more of. Modern social media being what it is, it’s fun to slow down sometimes and take a little longer to catch up with people I follow and chat with.

More of this sort of thing coming soon.

— JP

Control’s issue is that after only a couple minutes the game stops loading high quality versions of textures for things like characters and important world details, reducing everything to about PS2 level quality.

It seems to be a problem with the game engine itself. Knocking the graphics settings down works temporarily but the blurry textures come back after only a few minutes. I’m running on an RX 6700 XT, a 12 GB card, so I’m pretty certain I’m not hitting a VRAM limit. Even if I was, I’d expect lowering the settings to be a permanent fix.

What worked for me

I downloaded and installed these two mods from Nexus Mods. Installation is simple, you just extract the zip contents to Control’s root directory.

• Loose Files Loader
• Tweakables

Next, paste this XML into Control\data\globaldb\tweakables.xml.

<tweakables>
	<tweakable type="float1" name="Texture Streaming:Max texture load time per update (ms)" value="100.000000"/>
	<tweakable type="float1" name="Texture Streaming:Max texture request time per update (ms)" value="10.000000"/>
	<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Update Slices" value="1"/>
	<tweakable type="float1" name="Texture Streaming:Distance scale" value="0.250000"/>
	<tweakable type="float1" name="Texture Streaming:Mip target bias" value="0.500000"/>
	<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Min Pool Size MB" value="2048"/>
	<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Target texture pool size MB" value="4096"/>
	<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Max Dropped Mips (Characters)" value="0"/>
	<tweakable type="int" name="Texture Streaming:Max Dropped Mips (Player)" value="0"/>
	<tweakable type="bool" name="LOD: Use ObjectScaleOverride" value="1"/>
	<tweakable type="float1" name="LOD: ObjectScaleOverride" value="3.000000"/>
	<tweakable type="float1" name="Hierarchy LOD:Distance scale" value="3.000000"/>
</tweakables>

No, I haven’t got a clue what these settings are doing. I found them in a Reddit comment that I can’t for the life of me track down again, and you see now why I’m writing this post.

That should be all you need to do to apply the fix. If you’ve made it to the point in the game where you’ve cleansed your first control point (roughly 30-45 minutes in), a good quick way to test the fix is to go to the control point and switch between the different outfits. The new outfit textures should load in pretty quickly every time you switch. After applying the fix myself, I played for over an hour and never saw a blurry texture.

What didn’t work for me

I’m including these here because they may still be options to explore if you want to avoid modding the game for some reason.

It’s worth noting that my system has an Intel i5-13600K and an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT.

Switching to DX11 mode

Control, at least on my system, defaults to using DX12. If you add -showlauncher to the game’s launch options, you’ll be shown a menu that allows you to run in DX11 mode when you start the game.

Some people report that switching to DX11 mode solves the blurry texture issue. I tried it for myself and DX11 mode ran significantly worse than DX12 on my system. There was lots of noticeable micro-stuttering and the game just felt a lot worse to play because of it, but your mileage may vary.

Disabling resizeable BAR

This is another option that people report some success with. You’ll have to look up the specific steps of how to do this depending on your GPU. On AMD, you need to change a couple of options in the BIOS to disable resizeable BAR.

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t about to go changing BIOS settings to workaround an issue for one specific game so I didn’t even bother with this. Still, it might be something to try if you’ve exhausted other options and are bent on getting it to work.

A dumb closing thought

Why is gaming like this? This isn’t even close to my worst example. There’s one (not very old!) game whose executable I had to manually patch just to get launching on newer CPUs.

— JP

The gist is that you’re given a 3D model made out of colored voxels (blocks), and your goal is to recreate the model in code. The code you write will be run once for every voxel and needs to determine the correct value to display given an XYZ position. If you’re at all familiar with shader programming, it’s a similar concept.

I never thought I’d really enjoy a programming game but one of the reasons I’ve gotten invested in Replicube is the community. After you complete each puzzle, your solution is scored separately on both code size and performance then ranked in a global leaderboard so you can get an idea for how it compares to others. There’s even a built-in forum where you can ask questions or share your own models for others to solve.

Since playing, I’ve caught myself a few times looking at real world objects and thinking about ways I could create them using code.

There’s a pretty good-sized demo available on Steam if you want to try it out for yourself. Let me know if you end up getting into it and I’ll keep an eye out for you on the forum!

— JP

When did you first get interested in technology?

To tell the truth, I can’t think of a time I wasn’t interested in technology. We always had a family computer growing up and it seemed like magic to toddler me.

I grew up playing all sorts of games. One that especially stands out looking back was a mod for Half-Life called Digital Paintball. My dad was big into paintballing at the time (I even remember him bringing me along to a tournament or two!), and part of the hobby for him was hosting a Digital Paintball server.

I think the main reason this game stands out to me now isn’t so much the game itself but more that it sort of introduced me to the kind of unique shared experiences that tech makes possible. At this time we had enough computers around the house for both my brothers and I to all play together. Sometimes it was online on our dad’s server, but more often it was just us messing around together on the LAN.

It wasn’t just games though. By the age of three I was basically impossible to film because any time the video camera came out I’d drop what I was doing and run over to gaze through it. As I got older my dad introduced me to some of the basics of web design and programming and things sort of kept going from there.

What’s your favorite piece of technology of all-time?

This is a hard one, but I’m going to have to say the Nintendo DS. It’s the best thing Nintendo ever did, just above the Wii.

What really tipped the scales and made the difference between the DS being a really good handheld and the best handheld were the social features. They felt pretty novel at the time and even by today’s standards there were some really interesting things the DS was pulling off.

One of those was download play, a feature that a game could implement that would allow you to play wireless local multiplayer with people who didn’t even own the game. It would just take a minute or two to load while the necessary files were sent over, then all of a sudden you’d be in-game together like it was nothing. The game would be gone after a power-off, but still it’s hard to imagine any large game company, even Nintendo, approving of that feature today.

It also felt like a lot of developers for the system had real fun finding ways to build in local wireless multiplayer into their games. I have a fun memory of playing a giant game of capture the flag in the underground tunnels of Pokemon’s Sinnoh region during a big family reunion one year. Friends would come over and we’d let our Nintendogs meet each other. I even remember Pictochat, the built-in drawing chat app, being goofy fun when you had enough people.

What’s your favorite piece of technology right now?

Another tough one, but I’ll go with my Kobo Clara BW e-reader.

Phones today can do everything but aren’t good at anything. I can’t remember who I first heard that from, but I think that’s part of what makes phones slightly boring these days. My Kobo reader is a perfect example of a device that goes the complete opposite direction, doing one thing and doing it very well. I think that’s why I love it so much.

You can read my review of the Kobo Clara BW if you’re interested in my deeper thoughts on it. Overall though, I love that it’s a device that doesn’t really feel like a device. It doesn’t demand my attention, it holds a charge for weeks at a time, and it’s just a really comfortable reading experience.

Name one cool piece of technology we’ll have in 25 years

I’ve been thinking about this and AR glasses keep coming to mind. We’ll almost surely have the tech for really good augmented reality 25 years from now, the bigger question is whether many people will even want it.

A lot of people today are already increasingly conscious about how much screen time they’re getting. Augmented reality would be way more intrusive than anything we currently have and would have pretty high risk of severely isolating people.

A pair of AR glasses would have to be very carefully and tastefully designed in order to overcome the inevitable negative perception that a 24/7 face screen would get. It would be a massive challenge, much more difficult than actually building the hardware. And current tech culture being what it is, I don’t think any of today’s big tech companies would be capable.

I’m not super hopeful, but I do think a thoughtfully made pair of AR glasses could be useful and even help bring people closer together if done right. It would have to stay out of the way, treat you as the master instead of a consumer. I’d like to see that.

I challenge you

I’ll be sending this to a few people in case they want to do it, but if you’ve read this far then by all means I’d love to see your response too!

— JP

Earlier this week I put together a color e-ink picture frame powered by a Raspberry Pi.

It was a pretty easy, fun little project. For the past few days I’ve been having it run a simple script I wrote that chooses a random photo of mine and overlays the current weather conditions every 30 minutes.

I’ll share more about it including photos in a future post. In the meantime, I plan on making a new frame for it. The screen I chose is just barely too small for a standard 5x7 inch frame, so to get it in the frame I used I had to get a little hacky and the end result is a bit sloppier than I would like.

Games

I’m still enjoying my time with Hogwarts Legacy. I’ll say though that I almost think the game suffers a tiny bit from trying to do too much. I mean, how is it that I was still getting introduced to new mechanics 15-20 hours into the game? I also hope some more enemy variety gets introduced soon as combat has been starting to feel a little easy. Overall though, still a great game.

I completed 1000xResist since my last post and really liked it. The gameplay is mostly walking around and talking to people, but it plays so much with different ways to tell a narrative that that’s what keeps you invested rather than the gameplay itself. This one’s definitely worth checking out if that sounds like your thing.

I started playing the 2024 remake of Riven recently and it’s been going great. It’s easy to see where other games I love like Outer Wilds have taken inspiration. It’s one of those puzzle games where the explorable world opens up to you fairly quickly, giving you a lot to uncover and think about at the same time.

Riven’s art style really stands out to me. It feels oddly dream-like in the way I feel games from the 90s often do, and it’s really unique to see that feeling captured so well with modern graphics.

Music

The new Spiritbox album I’ve been looking forward to, Tsunami Sea, came out this week. I’ve only had a chance to listen through it once so far but I can already tell I’m going to be listening to it a lot, just like their previous music. Speaking of their previous music, I think this album left a stronger first impression on me than usual. It’ll take me some more time to get a stronger feeling for which tracks stand out the most to me, but I’m hoping I don’t take too long with it because Sleep Token is rumored to be releasing new music very, very soon.

— JP

Some of the more exciting news since my last week notes is that I’ve been working on a new web project. The idea is a searchable, curated directory of high quality and user-respecting web apps.

I’m taking a pretty loose definition of “web app”, meaning almost any website that has a function beyond “hey here’s a document”. Basically I’ve found that search engines do a pretty terrible job of helping users find quality tools, so this is hopefully a remedy to that.

I’ve got several dozen sites already in the directory, and I’m hoping to get that built up a lot through user submissions if this gains any traction.

I’ll have more details to share later I’m sure. I’m pretty close to launching it. The main thing left is to clean up the code organization a bit, and there’s not very much so that should go quickly. In the meantime if you have any sites you’d like me to add or know of anywhere I could find more, feel free to let me know.

Games

Hogwarts Legacy hasn’t really been on my radar, but my brother noticed it was on sale and we both grabbed it. I grew up with the Harry Potter books and movies, enjoying them but never really being what I would call a huge fan. That’s why I’d say this game has managed to take me by surprise.

I think the main thing is that it’s just really neat to see Hogwarts and so much of the world around it fleshed out in a way that it really hasn’t been before. I spent quite a bit of the early game just exploring and wandering around for fun. The combat is also more engaging that I expected. You have to react pretty quickly to what’s going on while making sure you’re using the right spells for the situation.

I was also kindly gifted 1000xResist very recently which is the other game I’ve been playing. I’m not very far into it yet but the story and setting are definitely very intriguing so far. Looking forward to seeing where it goes and why I’ve heard so much praise for it.

TV

The last thing I’ll mention is that I’m still very much into Severance right now. Season 2 has been a wild ride so far that I could never have predicted, and it’s only halfway through! Hearing everyone’s thoughts about the new episode every week is half of what I love about the show right now.

— JP

I’m still making my way through Animal Well because it turns out the post-game is way bigger than I could’ve guessed. I’m somewhere just past halfway in the third “layer”, as the community seems to call it. If you played games as a kid and ever let your imagination run wild about hidden secrets, Animal Well is basically the game that brings all those ideas to life.

My wife and I have also been playing through It Takes Two. I don’t have a whole lot to say about it other than that it’s a very enjoyable co-op puzzle platformer and that we’re both looking forward to playing more of it.

Some family and friends and I all recently got Contractors, a super moddable VR shooter. We’ve been having a great time with the mods that port all of the old Call of Duty World at War and Black Ops zombies maps into the game. Some of us played the original games together years ago, so it’s a real trip having the same experience again, just in VR this time with all the sense of presence that it brings.

HackTheBox

I’ve been continuing working through some of the active machines on HackTheBox, and I think I’m now at the point where I’m starting to notice some measurable improvement in myself. I’m less reliant on hints now and just a little bit faster.

I’ve completed most of the active easy Linux machines, so soon I’ll either be moving onto the easy Windows machines or maybe the medium Linux machines.

New keyboard

I got myself a Keychron V1 Max with brown switches. Coming from the cheap Amazon mechanical keyboard I’ve been using since university, it’s a massive improvement! The best way to explain it is that typing just feels so much more responsive now. For something that I use as often as a keyboard I think it really pays to have a decent one.

I don’t have any plans yet to go very deep into cutomizations, but it’s nice that keyboards like this one really encourage it. If you think there’s anything I should know, send me a message!

TV

Severance started its second season and I think it’s some of the best TV coming out right now. It’s really cool to see all the excitement over it since it’s been a few years now since the first season and people have had time to get into it.

I love that they’re releasing episodes weekly and not just dropping the entire season at once like some streaming services do. It’s the kind of show that’s really fun when you have time to speculate about everything and craft theories.

— JP