a blog post by my friend eevee which is, y’know, preaching to the choir about exactly what you think, but. yeah. https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/

@beeoproblem @morgan3d They should've called it File.existed()

New friendly quadplay website that is not a github README :)

https://morgan3d.github.io/quadplay/

In my Portable Puzzle Collection, it was recently (a few weeks ago) the 20th birthday of the game "Mines": a reimplementation of Minesweeper which ensures every grid can be solved by reasoning rather than guesswork. The first click in a completely blank grid is guaranteed to be safe, and to open an area of more than one clue, and after that, you can always identify a safe square to open next by thinking about the currently visible clues.

This makes it possible to generate grids with a much higher density of mines than standard randomised Minesweeper, such as the example shown here with 99 mines in only a 16×16 grid. I actually didn't predict that this would be possible when I wrote the grid generator originally: I only expected to be able to play on settings like the standard Windows ones, without those nasty last-minute frustrations. The ability to turn up the density by more than a factor of 2 was a very pleasant surprise – my algorithm was far more effective than I had anticipated!

The odd thing about Mines is: in the past 20 years, this one game has received far more bug reports about insoluble game instances than any other puzzle in my collection. Very likely more than all the other games *put together*.

But not one of those reports has turned out to be a real bug in the grid generation. In cases where they sent a save file or a game ID, I generally played through the game myself to make sure; if they only sent a screenshot, I've always at least pointed out something I could see in the picture. *Everybody* who sent this kind of report turned out to have missed something.

Happy 20th birthday, Mines!

From the creator of LOK and Abdec, there's a new solve-your-way-through puzzle book that just came out!
https://thinkygames.com/news/the-next-brilliant-puzzle-book-from-the-creator-of-lok-is-now-available/

So tell me about Loom.

You mean the latest masterpiece of screen protecting from Lucasfilms™ Brian Moriarty™?

You don't have to put on the red light.

Apple WWDC is happening, so: 20 years ago at WWDC Unity 1.0 has launched. I think it did have a massive effect of the whole game development! Also, 20 years in games tech is a really long time. #unity :unity:

Only a few days till REAC is here - register, log in, and soak in all the rendering architecture goodness!

Program: https://enginearchitecture.org/2025.htm
Register: https://tinyurl.com/register4reac25

See you there!!

No, You Shouldn't Let Your Kids Use ChatGPT. A thread. 🧵

1/16

This should be on TV every day, possibly multiple times per day…. #AI

@morgan3d ... So you're telling me there's a chance!

New #quadplay fantasy console release!

The highlights of this release are the new game state machine visualizer in the IDE and the game exporter for shipping standalone games.

Open source at https://github.com/morgan3d/quadplay

@morgan3d Ooo, standalone quadplay!

Air Pico has been released for the #pico8.

Pilot flights for a small aviation company, performing deliveries and charter flights across a 16km x 16km island map.

Available on the BBS: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=149301
Or itch: https://tommulgrew.itch.io/air-pico

After 171 days (in-game), 128 hours (wall time), 14 densely-packed pages of notes, and 801 screenshots, I think I'm calling it. That was a ton of fun!

@rygorous ah, in that case I believe I reached the same end through slightly different means.

@rygorous wait what? How? (Don't answer that)

Two different approaches to debugging a software problem:

The Sudoku approach: stare at the limited set of clues you have, and think harder and harder about them until you find a way to deduce something useful.

The Minesweeper approach: don't even try to figure out the solution from only the clues you have right now. Instead, focus on finding a way to acquire another clue, and then using that to get another, and so on. Eventually you've collected so many clues that the answer is obvious.

Sometimes the Sudoku approach is necessary, because you've got all the clues you're ever going to get. But I think my new motto is "Never Sudoku a problem when you can Minesweeper it."