Okay, I've chosen to roll the dice. I love gambling. Okay, well, I don't know about this kind of gambling. I left dinner out on the stove last night. What was dinner, Brad? Dinner was courtesy of my lovely partner. It was a... Concoction of let's see chickpeas, broccolini. Okay. Some shredded coconuts. Yeah. Some walnuts. Okay.
Spam. Okay. Over brown rice. I'm kind of anti the walnuts, just to be clear. But I'm pro the spam and the broccolini. It was a light dusting of walnuts. You don't like walnuts? Walnuts taste, they have a filmy taste to me that gives a real bad mouth texture that I don't like. Is that a mealiness, would you say? Are they mealy? No, no, they're mealy when they're bad and you shouldn't eat them anymore. But they're there.
There's a chemical in them that is part of that walnut-y flavor that just makes my mouth feel weird and makes the skin inside my mouth slough off to the point that I'm probably mildly allergic to it. Oh, okay. Well, that might be a separate issue, a medical issue.
Rather than a culinary one. No, I just think that. But as a result, it's an unpleasant culinary experience for me. I avoid it. Fair, fair. Also, you know, when you get down to it, all food is just chemicals, really. Everything's chemicals all the way down. Anyway, so yeah, it was a little stir fry, like broccolini, chickpeas and spam and stuff over brown rice. That sounds delish. I fell asleep sitting up on the couch last night. Yeah. And then woke up about an hour later. Oh, just an hour?
No, no, no, no. It was like I woke up an hour later and was like, oh, my God, I just fell asleep sitting up. I should probably go to bed. So I went straight to the bed. Oh, forgot to put up the food that was sitting out on the stove. Put it up about 12 hours later. Yeah, I just had it for lunch.
Well, you're going to have an exciting 36 hours. I'm usually like, look, I was the person in college who would just take the pizza off of the counter and chuck it in the oven in the box and then come out and grab a. Grab a slice and dip it in the congealed Papa John's garlic butter goo opened the next day. Did that ever go poorly for you? Nope. Always fine. Rock solid. Yeah.
I feel like fast food type stuff. And I consider that chance sort of chain pizza to be fast food is probably so preservative to out. You're probably always going to be fine in that case. Like home cooked food is a different ball game. So. I often will like eat dinner and then put dinner up at like if we eat at like seven thirty or eight, I'll put it up at like ten. Oh, yeah. I'm thinking about it. I do that kind of thing all the time. But again, this was cooked at like twelve hours is a lot.
This was cooked at like 6 or 6.30 p.m. around there and then got put up the next morning after we were out of bed. Yeah, but like there's no eggs, right? No, no eggs. I mean, like the spam, I think, has got to be totally fine, right? There's so much salt in that. Look. Yeah, you could put a can of spam opened on your windowsill for three days, crack into it later and you're fine. No problem. It was a pretty dry sort of stir fry. Like it was not a lot of.
moisture in there to propagate it was not not a culturing medium in there so much i do love a good dry stir fry Yeah, I think you're fine. I mean, let us know next week. We can talk about it on the patron episode. Like if you end up laying on the floor of the bathroom.
having regrets for your choices i want you to think about things that you're going to do and not do again in the future and we can talk about them later yeah i know we talked about food safety lately in the abstract but here we are now and here i am with an experiment
Yeah, I mean, look, sometimes you've got to do the science, right? Sometimes you've got to put theory into practice. Yeah, and the only way you're going to, you know, it's like you always say, sometimes you've got to let the kids touch the stove, get a little burn.
Sometimes you've got to eat some potentially rancid food and maybe spend 12 to 18 hours laying on the floor of the bathroom, and that's the only way you're going to learn. Sometimes you've just got to do the work for the people and give yourself food poisoning. Yeah, that's what the kids crave. Bye.
Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad, I'm coming at you straight from GDC, the Game Developer Conference, this week. Yeah, you've been there way more than I have. I keep wondering if you're going to get sick or not. I wear, I've worn masks a fair amount. That's fair. Well, and when I say sick, I don't just mean COVID. I also just mean a cold or flu. You know, conventions are tremendous vectors for disease in my experience of going to many, many conventions.
the thing not to belabor the spending time on the floor of the bathroom point but uh the thing i want to avoid more than anything is norovirus right now is it a foot that's i mean it's always a foot this time of year but yeah conventions are a good place to get norovirus because like hand sanitizer doesn't kill it apparently so you have to wash your hands a lot and you know it's fine i did good hand washing while there have you ever had it
Oh, yeah. I'm going to go and tell you. Just let that pause hang in the air. Yeah, it's bad. You don't want that. I'm pretty sure I've had it. I had something about 15 years ago. It's closer to 20 now. There was a norovirus outbreak in town at the same time, and I never got diagnosed, but it was possibly the sickest I have ever been. It was like three straight days of unable to eat. Oh, that's probably not. Norovirus is usually like 24 hours in and out. Is it?
So we had norovirus. My daughter was born in January and Gina and I got it. I got it the day before Christmas and she woke up sick the day of Christmas. And like, of course, she's also like nine and a half months pregnant about to explode. And it was it was. really really horrific really bad scene yeah no it wasn't what you want you don't want like a real pregnant lady on the floor of the bathroom just retching it's it's it's bad for everyone involved yep yep so um
Yeah. So, yeah, I wear a mask. I wear a mask. I took Bart in most of the days I went down. Wore masks when I was walking around the floor anytime I was in a dense area. The thing is, the... Convention Center itself is a pretty big area. The ceilings are big. There's lots of airflow through there. They redid it a few years ago.
there aren't that many it's not like old school e3 where you're just walking through mobs of people everywhere you go or comic-con or pax or whatever it's pretty loosely populated and and also these days A lot of the kind of casual socializing that used to happen downstairs in the convention center or in the areas outside talks and stuff, people go to Yerbuena Park and it's the kind of park above one of the halls of the convention center.
And it's a really lovely park with a lot of really nice grass. There's tons of benches and places to sit and little tables and there's even like chess boards and stuff like that. And a couple of restaurants and a tea room. And it's a lovely place to kind of hang out. Especially for our friends from parts of the country and world that get colder and are excited to consider Northern California in March to be a warm climate.
Wait, this is warm compared to some places or a lot of play. Yeah. Like, look, man, the people, the people from Boston and Quebec are thrilled to be here. Yes. Okay. Understandable. Yeah. I have not been to the GC show floor since probably the late two thousands, but yeah, I always.
Remember it being like pretty sparsely populated. I'm not, I'm not saying it was a ghost town. Like nobody was at the show, but like you could just kind of walk wherever, whenever. Well, it's not like, it's not like the dense parts of a big, big giant trade show, but it's busy for, for like a.
industry show right it's big for an industry show yeah it's like people people are excited to go see speed tree not anymore it's feature i went looking for speech i always go looking for speed tree it's part of my annual pilgrimage i did not see speed tree brad i'm sorry man i know
Well, you know, Lumen and MegaGeo take care of SpeedTree these days. They've eaten their lunch, I think. They got Sherlocked. Did SpeedTree get bought by anybody? I don't know. I feel like they did. I feel like that's the thing that happened in like 2018. But one of the things that they do now that I love at GDC. So this week we're doing a potpourri.
We've got a couple, a couple, a variety of topics, a couple of two, three topics. So we've kind of got like a, like a potpourri within a potpourri. Cause you've got a little mini GDC reports on some stuff here. And then another topic besides. Yeah. So one of my, one of the things that they do now that I love is they take both indie games. There's like the indie, there's an indie games pavilion where there's like all the stuff that's nominated for the, is it the ID?
is it the idgas or igdas i never can remember i want to say igda yeah international game developers association that's it the indie indie game awards basically And they have all those those folks set up with like little kiosks where you can just walk up and play the game. And like this year, it was it's always an interesting mix of like wildly popular indie games like Bellatro and. I'm completely blanking now and then stuff you've never heard of before. But this this year, I like.
I don't know. It was it was a good crowd of stuff. A lot of the games that were there, I'd already have already spent time playing because they've been out for a while. Yeah, that's kind of been a change. Over time, since any games just became video games, you know what I mean? Since they stopped being indie games and just became games like every other game. Yeah, it's more like it's more about budget, I think, these days than kind of.
But budget and whether you had like a developer or publisher giving you money to make your game like. Whether you're working from inside a publisher or outside a publisher, I guess, is maybe the way I think about it. Yeah, but it's just so much different than like 15 years ago when I did IGF judging for a little while, which is a different awards set, but same concept.
I think I probably talked about this before. There was one year it was kind of early to mid giant bomb. There was a year where my IGF judging because you would just go download demo builds of the games. Right. And it would just be like.
some Unity launcher or X and A or whatever. It was just like, hey, here is a zip file with a runaway, you know, a playable build of this game. I think it was all in the same batch of stuff I was judging for the finalists. It was like Limbo and Super Meat Boy and maybe Fez.
I'd have to go check. Super Meat Boy was the year before. They might have been the same year, but yeah. They might have all been entered at the same time. But the point is, I had never heard of Limbo or Super Meat Boy before I downloaded those demos and played them. Oh, wow. It was very different then in terms of indie games being able to build cache and hype and visibility prior to launch than it is now. So I didn't know what Limbo was until I downloaded a zip file of it.
to judge it for a competition and played it and was like holy shit yeah that that's a surprise yeah yeah things are quite different there now but uh anyway like do you want to do you want to start by just talking about the general vibe Yeah, we can. It was, well, okay. So I had multiple conversations with people about this and the people who've been going every year as I have for the last five or six years.
We're like, wow, this year feels a lot better than previous years. And then last night I went and saw a friend who hadn't been to GDC since like 2019. He was like, wow, it's like a funeral around here, right? So, you know. For folks who don't know, 2023, basically from the start of the Ukraine war until now has been a bit of a downtime due to a bunch of stuff like interest rates going up impacted people.
like the flow of money into video games, platforms like Xbox and Epic have kind of slowed down. Previously, there were a lot of Game Pass, there was a lot of money going into the games industry from Game Pass deals and Epic, those. those Epic exclusive deals that they were signing for a while, which, which like, to be clear, they were, they weren't giving enough money that you could build like an Assassin's Creed. Right.
they were giving enough money that you could absolutely build um like a big indie game uh if you were if you were smart about how you funded your game and how you did stuff so um you know you could you could end up with If you did your deals right across all platforms, you could end up with a couple of million dollars of money that basically had no strings attached to it, especially if you'd had a successful title in the past. And that's all gone now.
not all gone, but it's mostly gone now that that money's a lot harder than it was before to use the business person parlance. Yeah. I mean, hearing no strings attached is kind of shocking because it seems like now, like at a minimum, you would have to give some kind of exclusivity or something like that.
Okay, so the string would have been exclusivity, but no recoup, just to be clear. Those kinds of strings. Yeah, so you would say, okay, Epic gets to have my game for X period of time, and they're going to give us this amount of money for that.
you're going to use Epic services for whatever backend stuff you use or whatever. But then you wouldn't have to pay them back the money, which like if you take money from, I'm just going to pick Activision here because they're owned by Microsoft and nobody's going to care. But if you take money from Activision to publish your game, which is not a thing that they do anymore because they really basically just make Blizzard games and Call of Duty at this point, they would say.
okay, we're going to give you X million dollars to make this game and you have two years and we want these milestones to be delivered at such and such and such and such and such and such and each one's going to contain different key components of the game. and then um at the end of that time period when you put the game on sale then they're going to take all of their money back before you see a penny from the game
And then from once they get once they recoup their investment, then you'll have a shared split. Typically, just because this would be a bad deal. You shouldn't sign a deal like this if you're a game developer. If you want to know how to. get better deals please send me an email and we can i can help you out this is what i do um but uh but yeah so so you know there were there was a lot of unrecouped money from like playstation plus uh xbox epic bunch of other places um
That's that went away. The interest rates went up. The venture capitalist, the first wave of venture capital funded games, which also have no recoup, but you give equity in your company to them in exchange for that, which is probably an even worse deal. Actually, no, because I mean, because.
The thing that gets a lot of even successful first-time developers is you have to be able to float your payroll between the time your game comes out and the time you have enough money coming in from your, assuming you have a successful game. You have to be able to survive for at least three months because that's how long it takes anybody to pay you. And you have to be able to survive through the recoup often to get to a point that your game is building a sustainable revenue.
So unless you have something that's just wildly successful out of the gate, which case you go get a short term loan and pay your payroll and it's fine. Like it's hard. It's. It's easy to have a game that everybody knows the name of and a lot of people played but didn't sell a million copies. And you can't make your payroll. two weeks after you launch, right? If you didn't budget your stuff well. So like VC, essentially you're giving a venture capitalist a small percentage of your company.
that's worth very little, right? I mean, Small percentages. I guess that's the part I wasn't expecting. I assumed it would be like a pretty healthy chunk that they would want. It's a double digits, but it's not half. It's, you know, you're it depends. And again, this is one of those things that deals very wildly based on a bunch of different factors.
But typically for a venture deal, it's based on the value that your company's created. So if you have the if you have a bunch of smart people making a game, you can get a pretty good with with like with like with pedigrees. You can get a pretty good valuation, which means you can raise 10, 20, 40, 80 million dollars in some cases on not a whole lot of work actually done. You know, the hopes and prayers now.
a lot of those studios have folded by now right and that started in 2023 and the vcs kind of cooled and as the interest rates went up then then their interest in borrowing money to pump into new ventures kind of cooled and then the ukraine war happened and that made interest rates go up higher and then and then embracer disembraced a whole bunch of studios yes and suddenly there's a flood and then there were a bunch of layoffs and there's a flood of labor
And the money completely dried up in like 2023 to the point that people who had successful enough games that they would have signed a game to deal pretty easily with a publisher were being sent away. We're starting to see that change now is the good news. That's good to hear. People are signing small deals. OK, because previously, like especially on social media, you would see there was like kind of a mantra repeated last year quite a bit that you would see survive to 25.
Yeah, that's I mean, yeah, that's the thing people say on social media. I mean, among game developers, to be clear, yeah, yeah, broader society, you know, but financially or, you know, professionally survive in business terms. Yeah, cockroaching was the strategy for the last two years. And then and then we got here and then I feel like I saw quite a few people saying like, OK, we made it to 2025. Now what? Things don't seem much better, but maybe maybe they are finally slowly shifting.
i i think the realization this year is that everybody's getting to is that things aren't going to be the way that they were in 2020 and 2021 and 2022. Like we're thinking about the good old days of the pandemic when everybody was at home and there were zillions of people playing video games and there was a lot of money pouring in as a result of that. Just to be clear, I'm not saying 2020 and 2021 were the good old days. What I'm saying is.
It was a real boom time for the game industry because it was one of the few industries that was almost completely unaffected.
and that everybody being trapped at home was actually really good for business it turns out in fact it was not it was not unaffected it was boosted like it was affected in a positive direction yeah but but um the thing the place that i'm worried about and the thing that i think is happening is that there's like we had a kind of burgeoning like so in games there's been there's been a lot like
Triple a big stuff has been relatively stable for a long time. The budgets have ballooned pretty dramatically, but like a double a triple a game like Indiana Jones or. or Alan Wake or something Star Wars Outlaws or Cyberpunk, something that people spend 100 to 300 million dollars probably making in marketing.
those games have a pretty well-established market and people you know they know how to market them and people come out and you pay 60 or 70 or 80 bucks depending which version of the game you get and and like there's a there's a a path in place for those games and then
At the far other side of the spectrum, there's like single one, two, three person dev team games that like you make for maybe three hundred thousand dollars, maybe in spare time after your normal day job while you're working at Sears selling washing machines. But maybe it's like.
Maybe you get like $300,000 from a small publisher and you figure you're going to do this in 18 months and you and a few friends are able to put together a game. And that has a place too. It's harder to market those these days because there's not as much money being put into them. um but but the thing that happened in like 2018 2017 2018 2019 is we saw a bunch of established developers leave big triple a studios and start small
I'm air quoting small, but small Indies that were anywhere from like 10 to 30 or 80 people. Right. And I think that those people are feeling the squeeze now because the market. The market for games that cost more than $10 and less than $60 has essentially evaporated, it feels like to me. Really? Yeah. So things like dead game phenomena on Steam.
where if you have a multiplayer title and people hit the queue button and it doesn't queue in three tenths of a second, they start talking about it being a dead game and then they go post on the reviews and they post on the Steam forums and then there's a downward spiral that ends with people watching SteamDB and being like,
This says there's only two people playing right now, which is often bullshit because everything's cross platform now is incredibly toxic to games. The like I love Lethal Company and Phasmophobia and those games, but like. those kind of low investment low fidelity ten dollar titles have just absolutely you know they're they're games that you can play a ton for 10 bucks
And if you're a value purchaser of games, you're like, well, lethal companies, all I need at this point, man, it was only $10. Why would I buy a $30 multiplayer? Like, why would I buy hell divers? Right? Yeah, no. Helldivers and PoE2 were probably the exceptions last year. They're the two $30 titles that I can think of that came out that actually moved units. But most everything else is having a really hard time on Steam in that $10 to $60 range.
The other thing is just there's a fidelity expectation like the players have there's a fidelity. We talked about fidelity contracts before, but it's the idea that like you're. The attractiveness of the art in your game is makes players have an assumption about how good the rest of your game is going to be. It's why interesting it's. So, for example, if you have like really lovely environment art.
And then you don't have a bunch of animation and VFX and sound design stuff to back that up. Players are going to look like like they'll look at your game. They'll look at the way the guns work in your game. They'll be like, oh, man, these guns suck. They won't say.
hey, the sound effects and the VFX don't support the quality of the models and the environment on the game. They'll just be like this. This I expect this game looks like it should shoot like a battlefield or call of duty. And you're shooting like a boomer shooter because that's the budget.
Yeah, so since you put it in those terms, I have absolutely experienced this. And I think like the advent of, like you said, asset stores and like, you know, off the shelf engines that can generate like very nice looking visuals with. I'm not going to say no work, but, you know, like the modern unity in a real can can do quite a bit for your game to make it look very good in the box. Right. So it's real easy to make a game in a forest.
In a basics forest these days, right? Right. So it's not hard to find games on Steam that just from the screenshots look fairly excellent. You know, like you're like, man, that's a that's a very professional looking game. And then playing it is kind of a different experience.
So we we hit this with the Anacrusis, right? We had really we had an incredibly talented environment artist and we were working with really smart people and they made really great environment art. And then we got to the part through no fault of anybody on the team.
But it was a it was a team of like eight people made most of that game. So we didn't have if you if you look at what Destiny has in terms of animators, they have dozens and dozens of animators and like one person's job will just be to make. gun animations for the 3000 games guns in that game for, for their entire time at bungee. Right. Could be, um, there'll be other people. So, so I like to use gun gun stuff as an example for this. Cause it's, it's really instructive.
but if you think about like uh and it also explains why there's so many boomer shooters these days um but if you look at like a gun like the act of shooting a gun in a call duty you know there's it's it's it's very multidisciplinary The sound engineer involves the modelers who make the models of the guns, the texture artists who skin the guns, the VFX people who make.
The thing that happens when the bullet leaves the muzzle and then again when the bullet impacts and it's on different surfaces and has a different kind of VFX fire. So you get like different kind of sparks on metal. Then you get a puff of smoke on concrete and you get a puff of blood on a person.
um there's sound there's like screen shake often when you shoot there's um there's a little bit of a there's a there's an interesting thing that people expect that you've never noticed before and i'm going to tell you about it's going to you're going to see it every time now But when you turn the camera in a first person shooter, people expect the muzzle of the gun to track just a little bit inside a small box in the center. And if you don't do that.
all of this is leads to, Hey man, these guns suck. Yeah. That was the golden. I think that was the thing coming from PC shooters that yeah, for as much, for as much as I thought, uh, DC shooters did better than Goldeneye. The one thing when I came to that game was like, oh my God, the gun moves independent of the viewports. I mean, in that case, you could actually aim independently and shoot in different places. So that's not quite the same thing, but like.
A little bit of movements on the gun. Yeah, absolutely. GoldenEye accentuated it to way more than like most modern games are really subtle with it. GoldenEye was like it was pretty pronounced if I remember. It's been a long time since I played GoldenEye.
But yeah, so then you have sound and there's a bazillion other things that go into it. And all these people from all these different teams across the company have to work together. And if you're on a, you know, if you're working at Bungie and there's 300 people there. There's a whole team that just does gun feel stuff. Right. And it's probably a mixed team of like texture modelers, sound VFX folks.
animators, a couple of programmers and like all these people that work together on this one project. But if you have a 20 person indie studio, then. You know, you're when your animators working on guns, they're not working on characters. Oh, and we didn't even talk about hit reactions, right? Hit reactions are when you shoot the enemy and they they're.
they stagger or they move or they react to the, to the impact of the bullet on them, on their body. In my mind, that's probably the most important aspect of gun feel. Yeah. It's well. It's really weird because having watched people react to this as you're turning each individual component on, literally any one of these things will jack up the whole thing if you do it wrong. Sure. I mean, like I said this earlier, this is why we have so many boomer shooters is because.
When you're playing a game that looks like Quake, but runs on a modern game engine, you don't expect there to be hit reactions when you shoot somebody. You expect them to just explode into gore and goo. You don't expect there to be...
I mean, I guess it's probably screen shake, but like you don't expect there's a level of fidelity because your expectation as a player when you see that kind of muddy graphics is, oh, this is supposed to be reminiscent of something from a past time. It's not going to be like Call of Duty or Battlefield or whatever. So a lot of the interesting stuff I saw this year is people who are building tools to kind of last year, there was a lot of.
Obvious bullshit about AI replacing people's entire parts of workflows. Yes. Was it last year that NVIDIA debuted that demo? It was like a character in a bar. The Ace thing? Yeah, is that what it was called? That had like kind of generated text and speech? I mean, it was generated writing and speech, I should say. It was generating dialogue on the fly and generating the voice samples for it.
Yeah, it's it's I the NVIDIA has a thing that they do. It's an Ace Hotel demo where you go and have to kind of solve a mystery. They didn't show that this year. Weirdly, the.
The TLDR on that stuff is, I think everybody realized after spending some time with it, because Ubisoft had a couple of demos that they were showing as well that utilize the same backend for different purposes. And the thing that... became clear is it was pretty good at parsing player intent when you would speak to it or when you would have a conversation with it, but the outputs were universally pretty bad.
And weirdly unbelievable, like full on uncanny valley, bad, like a bad interaction with Siri or whatever. The stuff that we saw this and it all has. Look, I think everybody who listens to the podcast knows how I feel about generative AI stuff. But it had the problem of... You know, essentially, every time you played the game, you were feeding a kitten into a wood chipper to generate the the the the AI juice.
To make the characters talk to you badly. AI runs on kittens, huh? Finally, the shocking truth can be revealed. Keep chucking those kittens in, baby. Somebody get the weekly world news on the phone. So, yeah, so the kitten aspect of it is bad. The fact that they're replacing, you know, hey, we're going to replace all these expensive mouths that are on your team.
But also it wasn't the expensive mouths. It was the like it turns out writers and like entry level artists and stuff like that are relatively like in the game dev scale of who's cheap and who's expensive. They weren't the expensive people. So you're. not just replacing the thing that's the least expensive part of your pipeline, you're also killing off the jobs that let people go from being inexperienced to build mastery in their chosen fields.
um so like getting rid of voice actors which you know most games have like three days of voice acting which is going to cost like 30 or 40 000 at the outside um they have uh they have a bunch of artists who are doing work that is not expensive. The artists are inexpensive. No knock against artists. Some stuff's not just.
So it didn't make a lot of sense is the TLDR and the copyright status of the whole thing is still up in the air. And like if you build a $10 million game on assets that you probably don't own, that's good luck, man. So. Nobody did anything with this stuff. And this year I've seen people looping back around. I saw a couple of things that were really interesting that were like AI work that replaces a lot of the drudgery work of game dev.
I mean, that seems like the ideal, you know, especially when you're talking about a funding and budgetary crisis in game production, like something that increases the efficiency of the humans doing the work has got to come about. I mean, obviously those tools have existed for a long time, but something that.
can accelerate that trend. Well, yeah. And, and like we've seen, we've seen stuff that does this stuff before, like Houdini is a tool. It's not an AI tool, but it's a, it's a tool that lets you procedurally create procedural, create.
variations in stuff that is repeated often in video games so that it doesn't look so samey because human brains are really good at picking out things that are the same. And it's been around for a long time. People, you know, it's a technical artist tool. Everybody loves it.
you if you have a big if you have budget you get somebody on who does houdini stuff in your world and they make your they look here they make your stuff look more real just by adding variations yeah i've wondered i don't remember when the shit happened but there was a there was a very pronounced point
10? No, more than 10. Probably pushing 15 years ago when the classic problem of you pull the camera too far out from a landscape and the grass texture has just tiled in the most obvious way. Yeah. That just kind of went away and I assume tools like you're talking about are why.
Sometimes it's just that the cards are more capable and there's more RAM on the cards. So instead of having just one grid of... you know vertex shaders applied to your terrain you put multiples on top so that the noise so that like the interference patterns of the two things working together doesn't isn't so immediately obvious. Sure. I guess like virtual texturing, like, you know, the, the vaunted mega texture is probably also what solved that. Yeah. That kind of stuff too. Um, so.
One of the things I saw, NVIDIA had this demo of a thing in their booth that we talked about a little bit on The Full Nerd this week, but they had a procedurally generated animation tool. or sorry, a text to AI, a text to animation tool that used AI in Maya and Unreal. I believe they announced this at CES. That was part of the 50 series reveal.
jensen did on stage right like i believe text to animation is something that popped up in that presentation i think they talked about it i was a little skeptical if i recall at the time yeah but but so they first off they they licensed a library of mocap data which is a thing that is there's a bunch of them you can pay fifty thousand dollars and get access to a an incredible amount of mocap data that's that's basically collected
by putting by paying people to put the mocap suits on and then do a bunch of tasks over and over and over again we used one of these for foo vr um years ago we we hooked it in as a
The reason we had legs that animated better than Zuckerberg's in Meta Horizons in 2017 is that we were doing... We had multiple... things happening pushing and pulling against the the joints to like make them be believably human and one of them was we had a big giant library mocap data that we trained again on an early kind of ai library uh ai technology to serve as a counter to the springiness of ik so we didn't have like chicken wings and stuff like that hi i'm gonna
There are some acronyms here, IK and inverse kinematics. And is that, is that, is that a generative adversarial? Generative adversarial network. Yeah. Network. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um, good. Yeah. I couldn't remember what GAN was. So that was good. It's good that you pulled that good. Good that you had that one, Brad.
rattling around up there. So, yeah, so they use a library of licensed library mocap data. They showed this in what I kind of feel like is maybe the least interesting context. So they were pitching it as. hey you know you typically if you're a studio you buy time in a mocap studio and obviously like rockstar and and naughty dog and studios that are enormous just have
full-time access, multiple mocap studios, the whole deal. This isn't for them. This is for the people like your big indies, your $10 million indie game, or your small indies. that have one day of mocap or two days of mocap and then they you get back to the studio you're cleaning up all the data you're putting it you're ingesting and you're like oh we forgot to get a transition
between point A and point B when we were in the mocap studio. And then the choice is, do you spend another 10 grand going back in the mocap studio for another day to pick up the handful of things you've missed? Or is there some other better way? Or do you just do it by hand? Which is what I think a lot of people often do in this case. I mean, the real answer is maybe try to be more organized and not put yourself in this situation. But it's not always sometimes things change.
You know, writers write something about you taking your glasses off your face and then you're like, oh, God, we got to get an animation for that. And next thing you know, you spent thirty thousand dollars taking somebody's glasses off. But so they have a Maya plugin for this that basically gives you a timeline and you can connect, you can basically set keyframes at the beginning and end.
of a of a of a motion and you can say okay i have a character uh mostly i think it works with bipedal characters only right now so no animals or whatever but you have a character you say okay i want this character uh start the character here and the character here and then there's a text field that you can describe how you want them to move you can say i want them to run or i want them to do a big giant leap over a small obstacle right and then you hit
the generate button it goes up to the cloud uses some gpus in a cloud someplace and then spits out a number of variations on that animation you requested and You can kind of spread them all out, see which one you want to use, pick the one that you want, and then you can make further adjustments to that. So you can move individual joints on the model or...
You can change the starting and finishing locations. You can lock down all sorts of different things at all sorts of different paths in this timeline. And then you generate it again and get four more variants based on that. And you pick the one that you like and so on and so forth.
And the demo that they had showed like a cut scene type situation where a character jumps over a little bench and then sneaks around a fountain and then jumps up and transitions into a mocap animation that they had before.
um and and it was very seamless like it was a it was a really good demo because everybody i talked to who saw it was like oh my god i can't believe that thing that was really cool The neat thing I think about it for this and the thing I asked them about, which they didn't have a great answer for him, is this seems like the kind of tool that could like that ability to generate five variants of the same animation very quickly is.
incredibly exciting for generating things like hit reactions and um uh like movements gun anime reload animations all that kind of stuff Okay, because I was sitting here waiting to ask what is always the fundamental question about emerging AI tools. Where does this fall on the spectrum between allows a worker to do more? And there are a lot of work hours or just takes that person's job. And it sounds like maybe like the stuff you're describing, like hit reactions like you.
I think you said this before we recorded, so I'm kind of stealing your line, but also I absolutely agree with you. Like you can never have enough of those, right? You can never have too many of those. Yeah. Like in a perfect world, you would have some way to.
somewhat randomize every single hit reaction that ever occurs in your game because you want it to feel naturalistic and believable right and that's maybe not still not entirely feasible for different reasons but to functionally be able to get closer to that by allowing
Again, a human artist to sit there and curate and generate and tweak a much wider array of something that you've been kind of gated on in the past in terms of quantity seems like probably a good thing. Yeah, because like hit reactions are an interesting. are a good example for this, right? Because you have different types of, if you're making, I'm going to talk about zombie games because I know about zombie games. If you're making a game with zombies and they get shot in the head.
They're going to have a different reaction than if they get shot in the shoulder or the hand or the knee or the groin or whatever. And they're going to have different reactions to different kinds of weapons. So like if you have. a beam weapon that's going to be less impactful but they're going to kind of sizzle or shake or something if you have a small caliber handgun they're going to have a different reaction than if they're shot by a shotgun or a large caliber gun or a machine gun
And you ideally want to do all of those. But in the real world, what ends up happening is, you know, your animator does as many as they can. And like this, this is one of those forever jobs. Like anytime your animator has some downtime, they're going to make some more hit reactions because like it's it's money in the bank. for all intents and purposes. And if you can speed that work up and use a tool like this.
That doesn't have like this is this is one of the handfuls of AI demos that I've seen that I was like, oh, this is actually worth, you know, buying carbon credits to use. Right. Because because it is actually it's going to let you as somebody who's making a relatively low budget game instead of having to boomer shooter your game down so that your fidelity contract lines up with the actual game that you're able to make, you might actually be able to make.
better looking animations and better looking hit reactions and more a wider variety of them because you have access to these tools and that's really exciting Yeah, that sounds promising, honestly. Do you know, is it just taking those specific mocap sequences and inserting them? It couldn't be, though. It has to be customizing them as like...
Is the model just trained on those animations? It's not using those exact animation routines every time it generates something, right? Like you're not going to see the exact same walk cycle popping up in multiple games because that cycle was utilized by a bunch of different prompts, I hope.
You shouldn't. I mean, if you give the same prompts, it's I asked if it was deterministic and they said no, because nothing is ever deterministic. Sure. Yes. True. The thing to remember is that the animations at this point.
coming out of like the the the munged up data that they use to train the ai is just a series of vectors so what the machine knows is that when you have this vector followed by this vector followed by this vector it like these vac when you have these three vectors in a row moving in this direction then usually the next one is one of these several different things and it's giving you variance based on those
And at some point along the way, they have a large language model that ties in and and and breaks down what running a character running across a courtyard versus a character sneaking across the courtyard, how those how those differ, which I assume. probably is them going in and hand coding one of these paid data sets that they bought that they licensed but i don't i did i should have asked about that i didn't think about i didn't i didn't
I didn't actually ask if they're training based on vectors. I have to imagine they're training based on vectors and skeleton. I can't imagine they're training based on like the point cloud data that you get from or the ping pong ball tracking data that you get from a mocap studio.
And then the other stuff that this should let you do really easily, and we didn't talk about this at all because the person I asked didn't know the answer to this, but a lot of like when you take a mocap, when you do a lot of mocap, One of the things you end up having to do is normalize your idle ins and outs that when you blend those animations together, you get the hand start in the same place and they're not skipping around. And I assume that this would let you do.
do that pretty easily but i don't know for sure because you're always starting from those same points when you want to yeah you want to have basic starting same starting points as much as you can use the same starting keyframe or whatever yeah yep This all kind of reminds me of the debate that's been going on. Like there's been a discourse taking place, let's say.
Oh, I love a discourse. Yeah. Who doesn't over the last like a year, maybe? I don't know. Like this idea has emerged that games look too good and right these days. And that's what's killing the industry in a fiscal sense. which I increasingly think is kind of a fallacy or like the wrong target to direct your ire at. And like, I've seen other developers comment on this in the last few months. Like, I think the perspective might be shifting on this, but I read this.
Read this really good illustrative blog post by Joe Wintergreen, who is a longtime game developer who I had never heard of before. This blog came across my feed, but it's about tools. It's about it's about tools and hardware. OK, it's about like. why better engines and also better hardware to run them on matter to game developers in ways that players will never see or imagine because they don't make the games. Is this part of the.
uh why why do games that came out in 2015 look the same as games that came out in 2025 but they won't run on my 1080 ti yes that's that's part of the what he addresses in here like the title of the blog is kind of it's a bit flippant of the blog but if
If you want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, graphics tech advancements should please you, is the title of the blog. I'll link it in the show notes. But again, it's responding to this idea that the labor costs of making games look... very good these days are what is causing the funding and budgetary crisis in games. And his counter to that is it's never been easier to make games look as good as they do now. And that's a good thing because
That allows developers to do more with the time they previously would have spent working very hard to make games look better or make them load faster or X, Y and Z things that tech, that hardware and software have improved on. Well, just making a game that runs now is easier than it.
ever has been before like like literally you can download the shooter.exe template for ue5 point whatever the current version 5.3 or something 5.5.3 and and put install that and then download some trees and free trees and free grass and free rocks that are mega scans from the, from the unreal asset store. and put those in there and then put a path down the middle and you can have something that looks like a video game.
in in like a couple hours pretty easily um it won't now it won't do anything there's no logic there's no game there's no collision like you'll walk right through the trees all of that stuff you have to build but the bar to end the barrier to entry is is very low the the tricky thing is that the the kind of the kind of the third rails that like there's still as many or more third rails in video games now as there were before
right like you can make decisions the first day that you start working on a project that will absolutely that will prevent you from ever shipping on a console if you don't know to avoid them right or will cost a fortune to change
to go back and refactor everything to make them work. Um, it's, and, and it's not like, this is like, this isn't one of those things where there's like a series of small choices. It's, it's literally every choice you make is going to close some doors and open some others. So. Um, it's, it's, it's hard. I love his point about, uh, the tool, the writer is needing better tools for this because like often the writers do their writing and then put everything into spreadsheets.
And then those spreadsheets get ingested into video games. And when I see games that do that versus when I see games like like Firewatch, they built a really cool database system for. lines of dialogue the the voice line the you know that gave me a ton of voice acting for for 2016 whenever it came out And they kept the assets, the original assets, the munged up and ready to go in the game assets. All that stuff was built in a tool that made it easy to run. So there wasn't like.
There wasn't an enormous list of files on a server someplace that had the text line for the subtitle and all the translation lines for the different languages and the original audio for the. And the generated audio, like the file names in a spreadsheet someplace, it was just a database that contained all the stuff you need. And when they hit the compile button, it just got spat out in a way that the game engine could understand. Anyway.
That's very neat. Tools are neat. Doing more work in less time with, you know, to Joe's point, you can use that for good or for evil, right? It can be a. Hey, we're going to fire half the people and then expect the people who remain to do double the work. Or you can.
i mean if you're starting out from scratch you could hire the half the people and do twice twice as much work i guess yeah i mean at that point is made very explicitly here after after two paragraphs of extolling the value of easier and better graphics When you see a big company grind their workers into paste, forcing them to deliver more and more on tighter and tighter schedules, please be aware it has nothing to do with graphics or hardware or gamers demands for anything.
And everything to do with the capitalist thinking that says, oh, you can work twice as fast now, I will give you half the time. Yeah. So anyway, the reason I bring this up is just because the type of tool you're describing. I mean, I was skeptical too. at CES when the words text to animation popped on the screen but like the way you describe it that still involves an artist with like a you know a functional working expertise in
basic human locomotion, you know, and like kind of the ins and outs of what makes good animation and like a critical eye for filtering good from bad and all that sort of thing. Like that, like, like you said, like that's the type of thing that, I mean. I feel like the term force multiplier is kind of buzzwordy, but it does feel pretty applicable here as something that lets somebody who already is good at their job and has expertise do more with the time that they have and like the blog.
Feels like it dovetails with the type of tool you're talking about here pretty directly. That's that's exactly it. I like it's not going to like this tool is not going to make me into an animator that can make tools make animations for a video game. Right. Or even even for like a prototype that I'm going to. used to sell a video game um but but it if it makes the the the kind of you know the the hard heavy lifting work of
building animations for computer games easier, then that's really interesting to me. And I think that I think that's worth spending more time on. Right. And that's just the nature of progress, right? To have better tools that allow you to do more stuff. I mean, like.
Frankly, it goes back to the speed tree example, like speed tree is the same type of thing of if there had been an industry of people making trees by hand and making good livings on it, speed tree would have put those people out of work. You know, it's just that that was a tree is algorithmic built by human hands and not.
by feeding data sets into a weird computer black box and having it, you know, iterate on itself a million times. Well, and just to be clear, so this was like trade show tech demo, not something I could sit down and spend a lot of time with. so we saw the dem the thing that they were demoing live with the connection to the server was
making a model jump over a bench and then walk to the transition point for the next model. And then the rest of it was canned. So who knows how well this actually works in real life. they said it's tech preview maybe later this year so it's not actually a shipping thing right now yeah like i should also say i'm not even bullish on this particular tool like maybe this tool is not it at all but like there's like hardware is not going to slow down in improving
Yeah. So like we are going to have to have better tools that meet the needs of new hardware capabilities. And so like some new types of tools are critical. One of the things I heard, I had multiple conversations about this throughout the week. is you know gta 6 is going to cost rockstar a billion dollars to make reportedly oh at least plus marketing money and all the other stuff on top of that yeah um but
Like that's an unfeasible. There's one game that can support that kind of investment. And people are a little skeptical that even GTA can support that level of investment. The conversations I had ranged from, I mean. Look, I had some conversations that were a little funny because people were like, oh, nobody's buying games that cost more than $10 on Steam. Like, yeah, that's a problem for a lot of people, it turns out. I think GTA should cost, this is not me, just to be clear.
I think they should launch GTA way more than 60 bucks. I think it should be a hundred dollars because it's a billion dollar game. And I was like, okay, don't ever say that out loud where people will hear you person I was talking to because you'll get fired into the sun. But. There's a lot of general concern about what a billion-dollar Grand Theft Auto is going to look like and what it's going to do in terms of player expectations for graphics and stuff like that.
We're already seeing it with like Indiana Jones and Outlaws and other stuff that really leans into the modern hardware. But anyway, or particularly the six games that are making all the money, you know, like you're. Yeah. What are they? Fortnite League. Oh, yeah. League is still in there. Fortnite League, Minecraft, Roblox, Call of Duty. Maybe Valorant or Counter-Strike. I don't know. I mean, those are the games that make the kind of revenue that allow.
legions of people to make them continue looking amazing, right? Like the smaller games and smaller teams of the world have got to have some some leg up to try to compete with that without the without the same level of funding right yeah counter-strike 2 is the biggest thing on steam right now 3x so yeah probably counter-strike and league and valorant and uh
uh fortnight and not so much apex these days it seems um the other thing i got to see was games that don't care about graphics in many cases at all Or, yes, like in a literal sense, I think some of these games barely have graphics, right? They're much more tactile. Some of these are only video games in the sense that a computer runs them. So one of my favorite parts of GDC is always the alt control.
GDC section, which is I've never heard of this before. Oh, we've talked about it before. Have we? Oh, yeah. It's it's fabulous. So they've been doing it for quite a few years now. It started before the pandemic, but it's student projects. but mostly student projects that use weird non-traditional controllers to control, control games.
And so there have been some bangers in the past. One of my favorites was this game that was like you had to solve a mystery by using a like an old school old timey phone. switchboard like the kind that you plug a quarter inch jack and you pull it out you plug it into a different one yeah you're getting different different messages each time you plugged into a different jacket over here different parts of conversations and stuff it was amazing
You know which one that was? That was from years ago. I can't remember what it was called, unfortunately. That was not this year. That was not this year. I was going to say I watched a bunch of these videos, but I didn't see that one. We'll link this. All videos for most of these are up. I'll put that in the show notes. Yeah, on the GDC site.
A lot of these go to festivals like a lot of these. If you have like indie game festivals in your in your neck of the woods, you'll often see these folks bringing their games there. And they typically, like I said, they typically use nontraditional controllers. Sometimes it's just like a straight motion control or some buttons like there's Badger Badger Badger is one of the things they had this year, which uses, I think, NFC cards.
as the controllers so you have like you have you there was just a big panel in front of players and they had to put their their player badge on the thing that they wanted to do next and move it around and it ended up being kind of frenetic and space teamy Sure. Also, maybe it's because I've been watching a lot of Severance lately, but there's a lot of like corporate influenced stuff at this thing, this one. And what was the other one? Chroma Corp.
Like Chroma Corp is extremely severance. There was a lot of severance like like that. That's a new relatively new development. The severance vibes often like there were often like steampunky or kind of like just like. Often follows trends. The alt control GDC is what I'll say, but I was surprised that there was so much separate stuff this year. Chroma Corp is Chroma Corp. It kind of reminded me I didn't actually get to play this.
But it kind of reminded me of there's a board game called Captain Sonar. That's basically it's kind of in between Space Team and Battleship, the board, the old board game where you have. bunch like you have a team of four or five people that are all trying to pilot your submarine And each person has a defined role. So like one person is the sonar operator and listens to other players. And one person is the captain and tells everybody where to go. And one person is the engineer.
controls the health of the ship and one person is the torpedo operator and shoots the torpedoes and while you while your submarine is playing there's another submarine that's playing too so you're listening like your sonar operator is actively listening for the other team's captain so that they can map it's it is It is. It makes me wish we still had offices. We could go play this because it would be such a fun stream. That sounds rad.
But this is this is not at all like that in theme, but it's the same kind of vibes. Like there's four people or five people in the room. They each have different specified tasks. The tasks are very severancy and that like. You're sucking the color from the world. You're like, we're going to company that owns all the color. Yeah. I might say there's definitely some like aperture science vibes to a lot of the visual design of this.
100%. But the controller for this one was a, they literally took a cubicle, a series of cubicles and like cel-shaded them by painting the corners so that they looked cel-shaded.
and they built a bunch of stuff out of foam core and cardboard and and like all their controls are buttons just in the world they're like they're like normal ass buttons that you have to press and you everybody sits down at the station and they all have to kind of do their stuff and communicate and work with each other and it ended it was really fun to watch yeah like they built these big like
a custom kind of control surfaces, control decks. That's just basically like three big light or I have four big light up buttons on a joystick basically. And there's this again, very aperture looking. control box sort of interface on the wall with these little light-up tubes coming out of it that they're having to... I would pay money. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I would probably pay money to go to a place and play a game.
that has you sitting in a cubicle farm to me the thing on the wall looked almost like an among us mission like an among us task Like there was there was definitely among us vibes is the vibe I got watching people play. Sure. I could see that or a little bit of space team, like a little bit of space team. Yeah. I mean, I think among us tasks and space team tasks, basically the same, just it's the frequency and intensity. Sure. This almost I don't know why this.
Drifted into my head when I was watching this, but it almost reminded me of like, did you ever go to a battle tech center or do you remember those? No, I always wanted to, but I never got to go to one. I got to realize my dream when we went to Las Vegas. When we drove out West one summer, we went through Vegas and I got to go to the Vegas battle, battle tech center, but it just, that was to be clear. That was, that was in the mid nineties, 95, 96. Okay. 95 ish.
It was basically a networked LAN game, but like, you know, with a bunch of battle tech, like military robot trappings inside, you were sitting in a big pod, but it was basically just a networked kind of PC shooter. That was not a warrior two, right? On a big projector screen. Yeah, but not available commercially. You can only play it against other people in these centers. I actually came across the score sheet from that visit in the basement a few months ago.
Wow. But the point is, it was a it was a big location destination based multiplayer setup that with a bunch of custom hardware and software built for it that you had to go to a thing to play with other people. And I look at something like this and think like. Maybe there's room for something like that to come back. LBEs, man. What is that?
Location based entertainment. People love millennials love experience. They don't like buying things. Totally. I mean, I know like escape rooms and rage rooms and all that stuff are big, but you don't see a lot of like video game or like custom bespoke, you know, interact interactive software type.
experiences like that there's vr stuff but not really beyond that and the escape rooms are often like escape rooms are this like a good escape room is this the ones out at um at the palace of fine arts are Literally, you're inside a room that's all computerized, and they just make it look not computerized. Apparently, I just need to go to an escape room. You need to go to escape rooms, yeah. I mean, this thing has very explicit computer trappings in it.
Yeah, this is a little different. I understand what you're asking for. This is not exactly what you're I mean, this is this is what you're asking for. I've never seen anything that's exactly like this before. Yeah. Let's see. Should we talk about how to pet your cat, Brad? Yes, I saw actually saw other people posting videos from having played the game with a large cat butt controller. Yeah, so the controller is like an enormous stuffed cat ass and you have to you have to.
I broke him. Finally, you, you have to, you have to pet the cat. It's really, it's on the bat, but sometimes cats like being petted on the butt. Apparently sometimes they don't. I'm allergic to cats, so I don't really get this experience very often. People seem to enjoy it. I didn't see much in the video for that one about what tech is driving that giant cat butt controller. I think it was just accelerometers.
pressure sensors and stuff like that some some of the other videos on here had a little more behind the scenes info on how they're doing things the pirate ship game back off me booty back off me booty yes is a seesaw based game It's the first seesaw-based controller I've ever seen. You and your matey, I think it was how they pitched it, have to sit on opposite sides of a seesaw.
And you rock the ship back and forth on the video game to aim and like have your cannons aimed at the right spot. So it's basically a rail shooter on a ship. But one person is looking on one side of the ship and one person is looking at the other side of the ship and you shoot.
When the angle of the ship is the right way to hit the target, like when you get the lob on the cannonball to hit the target that you want. So I presume you are constantly having to communicate with your seesaw partner as to when to move up and down. And when to slow down and when to go fast. And yeah, it was quite good.
And anyway, I bring that up because that video, they actually do go into pretty extensive detail about how they built the seesaw controller, everything from the type of wood they use to like what sort of Arduino is in there. And yeah, they go into they actually go into.
some some specific detail about like they said for example the angles they are using for that thing are narrow enough that they don't have to constantly recalibrate the accelerometer on the arduino but that makes sense because because they don't need a very wide range of motion so like some pretty interesting detail
Like there's definitely a lot of like maker vibe to to all this stuff. I was going to say the the thing that happened when Arduinos like this all started to get really interesting when Arduinos and motors got cheap because people were able to do a lot more interesting things with their projects than just.
Being good at electronic circuits, it becomes, you know, the power, the superpower of the Arduino is it turns a physical world problem into a software problem. If you know the right sensors to use and and like these. And also, these are large teams for student projects. Like this one, the back off me booty is like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 people between.
producers engineers artists tech artists designers research the user research person and music editor so it's like it's a lot yeah in fairness a lot of these um a lot of these games are And I say this lovingly, fairly bare bones on the software end, but that one.
That one is the most sort of professional looking. Well, most many of these are senior projects for like your thesis projects for your for your game design program or game game school program. All I mean is back off me booty probably had like. greater art needs than some of these other projects. Yeah, that makes sense. And then let's see, do we want to talk about clench the stench?
Yes, that one was hard to get my head around until I finally realized what they're doing because the controller for that is extremely not obvious. Yeah, the control.
I walked up to this one and there were four people sitting in office chairs behaving like absolute maniacs. I couldn't figure out what they were doing because they were like they were like swiveling back and forth on the spinny part of the chair. They were slamming the arms. They were leaning back. They were doing all sorts of stuff. And the upshot is they had hooked a bunch of sensors up to these office chairs and they were the controllers for what looked like crazy taxi in an office chair.
So, like, you accelerated by swiveling the chair back and forth, kind of in a little bit of a rhythm-y thing. And then you could attack other players by whacking the either chair arm. And there was other stuff that I don't exactly understand what happened. The gist of the it's a little crass. The gist of the game is that you're working in an office and there's only the only bathroom available is a portal outside. Single porta potty for the entire country or entire company.
Yet again, another example of a game about the rigors of surviving capitalist employment. Yeah. Well, look, man, bathrooms are expensive and people can just hold it. Right. But I think the idea is you ate something that maybe didn't agree with you and you're racing Jim from accounting to get to the portal at first. It was fun. It looked like a lot of fun to watch people play. I did not wait in line to play that, unfortunately.
But yeah, so all the controlled GDC, always fun. It's worth checking out the website. We'll put it in the show notes so that you can see the videos. I think these are probably people's submission trailers that they did for the... for the for the project for their projects when they were submitting them to the to gdc very cool uh brad yeah i think we should table the third topic yeah i think you're right um
I think we were a little on the fence about looping it in the first place. I think it's interesting, but also it's a topic that's been discussed quite a bit over the years. Yeah. Has Apple lost it? Well, but not just that. Specifically, Apple has said, hey, we're they're delaying the Apple intelligence LLM stuff or maybe not doing it at all. It's unclear. It's or I guess maybe to be more explicit, they announced the AI driven Siri upgrade.
last year with the phone or go over close to the phones or for launch on the new phones. And they have basically delayed it pretty dramatically into what it looks like next year at this point. I would describe it as indefinitely at this point is what it sounds like to me. Right. And like coming right off the heels of Vision Pro, basically doing what they said it would do, but not selling particularly at all.
like it's kind of it's it's incited a fresh wave of people going like okay what's going on with what happened to the old apple where is the innovation is there a real problem here i mean we can talk about it maybe another time but i think i don't think apple vision pro not selling not changing the world at 3 500 a pop is and a kilogram or whatever it was some enormous weight is a huge surprise but i do think delaying
like the continual announcement and delay of features that are slated for fall and then being delayed later for, for phones is, is I think that's the signal, not the, not the Apple vision pro thing. But we'll talk about that another time. In the meantime, what we will talk about. Well, first off, next week is a patron is a Q&A episode, rather. So if you have questions about stuff we've talked about or other things, you can send them to techpod at content.town and we will.
or post them in the question seeking answers channel in the discord and we will do our damnedest to answer them next week. As always, if you want to find out how to get into that discord, you can go to patreon.com slash tech bod, where for five bucks a month, you get access to the discord, you get access to the monthly patron exclusive episodes. You help support Brad and I. So we keep making the show indefinitely, which we appreciate greatly. We absolutely do.
And, you know, because as as we've said, we don't really take ads here. So if you want to if you want to help support the show, if you want to make if you want to make all of our podcasting dreams come true, consider chucking five bucks a month at us at patreon.com slash tech pod. So a huge thank you to all of our patrons, but a very special thank you to our executive producer, dear patrons. We thank every week, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippet, Bunny Fiend.
Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you also so much. Thank you. And I guess that will do it for us this week. I will see you next week for a Q&A, Brad. I'll be there.
And in the meantime, I'm sorry. Why are you holding up a dental implement? I was trying to scrape something off of a. a piece of electronics the other day so it's been sitting on my desk here for a while a terrifying hook just entered the frame of your video you don't look dental tools are so good for like getting stuff out from under motherboards or or like positioning uh
positioning of uh smt soldered device on the board precisely so you can hit it with the solder just just a little bit yeah sure i didn't know those were available to civilians though look on amazon anything's available to civilians okay fair it is just metal i guess
they can make stuff out of metal pretty easily. You don't have to get a prescription. You don't have to get a license to be a dentist. Barbers used to do it. Thanks, everybody, for listening, and we will see you next week. Please consider the environment before printing this podcast. We'll be right back.