标签：#game

Rhythm Heaven isn't Nintendo's best-known series, nor its most prolific. Prior to the launch of Rhythm Heaven Groove on the Switch this week - it's out on July 2nd - there were only four previous entries, one of which was exclusive to Japan. The most recent came out more than a decade ago. Even still, […]

Crossword puzzles are easy. But what if you had to solve one while running inside the hardware constraints of a Large Language Model?

Yesterday, we kicked off our physical newspaper, The Daily Context, at the AI Engineer World’s Fair...

There's a Yu-Gi-Oh game on PS1 where you can fuse two cards together. The result isn't random. There are rules. But you don't know the rules yet — you just know that two inputs produce a third thing that neither input was, and that the third thing surprises you even when it shouldn't. That's the hook. Not the surprise alone. The realization underneath the surprise that the system has depth. That there's a grammar to what's possible, and you can learn it. I've been building toward that feeling ever since. Jade Cocoon does the same thing with monsters — merge two creatures, watch the result carry both parents in its design. Dragon Quest Monsters runs on fusion too. Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories taught me that combination-as-discovery is its own mechanic, separate from any theme it wears. Everything Is Crab is the roguelike version: you absorb what you fight, you become it, you discover what you're becoming one encounter at a time. No Man's Sky showed me that procedural generation has finally caught up to what those PS1 games were reaching toward — creatures that feel like they emerged from a system rather than a designer's hand. The mechanic isn't genetics. Genetics is just the implementation I keep reaching for. What I'm actually trying to build is a machine that produces controlled emergence — outcomes that surprise you within a system deep enough to eventually master. Pure RNG is a slot machine. You can't get better at it. Pure determinism is a calculator. You can solve it and put it down. The games I keep returning to live between those poles: consistent enough to reward learning, deep enough to keep producing novelty. TurboShells was an attempt at this. Turtles whose bodies expressed their genomes at render time — shell radius, leg length, color emerging from a sequence. The faster ones bred. Over generations you watched the population drift. The system had rules. The outcomes still surprised you. SlimeGarden chose basic shapes deliberately. If the creature is simp

We (at DEV and MLH) are covering AI Engineer's World Fair by printing a physical newspaper called...

The idea came from an extremely serious game of hide and seek with my cousins. We were adults, which made it ridiculous, but also strangely perfect. Someone was hiding behind a couch in plain sight, surviving only because the seeker did not look carefully enough. That made me wonder: what if looking carefully was not enough? What if the seeker could not freely look around the room? What if they could only see the world through their phone screen, while virtual obstacles blocked parts of their view? That became the core idea behind AR Hide and Seek: a local multiplayer hide and seek game where 2-5 players use the space they are already in. The hiders physically hide somewhere in the room, while the seeker views the environment through an iPhone. The phone fills the space with digital clutter, making familiar rooms harder to read. One phone. One seeker. Real hiding places. Virtual obstacles. Why LiDAR? LiDAR on iPhone Pro models gives the phone a real-time depth map of the environment, with centimeter-level understanding of the space around it. That means virtual objects can be placed in ways that respect real-world geometry: a crate can sit on the floor, a wall can align with an actual wall, and obstacles can feel like they belong in the room rather than floating on top of it. For a game where the virtual environment needs to feel like it genuinely fills the space, that difference matters immediately. Without reliable depth information, objects can drift, clip, or hover in ways that break the illusion. The tradeoff is device requirement. LiDAR is only available on iPhone Pro models, which narrows the audience. But for this game, the better AR experience was worth it. The seeker sees a version of the room cluttered with virtual obstacles. The hiders are still physically hiding behind real furniture; the phone does not make them disappear. It simply makes finding them harder. Designing the Core Loop The mechanic is simple on paper, but it took a surprising amount of tu

為什麼那個會「注意你」的展品，反而讓你更想靠近 博物館互動設計的隱形槓桿 東京。 teamLab 展覽入口。 地面是一整片黑色的水面，倒映著數位花朵。 你踏進去。 花朵在你腳步周圍散開，隨著你的移動一圈一圈地綻放和飄落。 你停下來，花也停下來。 你開始走，花就跟著你。 你以為是感應。但仔細看——延遲了大概 0.3 秒。 不是「立刻反應」，是「好像在觀察你，然後才決定」。 你站在那裡又多看了三秒。 你第一個「對」 讓我問你一個問題。 你去過那種「互動博物館」嗎？牆上寫著「請觸摸」，但你碰了之後什麼都沒發生——或者是那種「語音導覽機」，你對著它說話，它說「請靠近一點」。 然後你就失去興趣了。 現在讓我想另一個場景。 一個會動的恐龍骨骼。你站在它面前的時候，它頭轉過來看了你一眼。 你知道這是感應器。你知道工程師設計了「檢測到人」的時候讓它轉頭。 但你還是覺得—— 「它在看我。」 兩種互動，哪一個讓你停留更久？ 你第一個「咦」 這裡有一個秘密。 讓人停留更久的，通常不是「立刻反應」的互動。 是那種「 好像在決定要不要理你 」的互動。 為什麼？ 因為「立刻反應」讓你確認了——「這是機器」。 但「好像在決定要不要理你」讓你的大腦進入了一個不確定的狀態—— 「它真的知道我來了嗎？」 「它在決定什麼？」 「我想看看它決定什麼。」 這個「我想看看」就是互動設計裡最重要的瞬間—— 參與者的好奇心，被啟動了。 玉樹真一郎在《任天堂的體驗設計》裡，分析了一個現象： 《超級馬里奧》裡，當玩家靠近一個問號磚塊，頂了它，沒有任何東西掉下來。 玩家不會覺得「這個遊戲壞了」。 玩家會想：「 為什麼這次沒有？ 」 然後再頂一次。 為什麼「沒有東西掉下來」沒有讓玩家放棄？ 因為設計師在玩家心裡創造了一個「 還沒發生的確定事件 」。 玩家知道「遲早會有東西掉下來」。所以他們願意等待、願意再試一次。 博物館的互動設計也應該這樣。 不是立刻給答案。是讓你相信「答案快來了」，然後讓你一直站在那裡等。 你最後「我要改變做法」 讓我說一個失敗的設計。 一個科技博物館有一面「觸控牆」。牆上有很多按鈕，碰了就會播放影片、發出聲音、變色。 一開始很多小孩去碰。 但大概十五分鐘之後，那面牆就沒人碰了。 為什麼？ 因為碰了 100 次，沒有任何一次比另一次更「值得等待」。 每一次都是立刻發生，每一次都是同樣的結果。 沒有任何一件事需要「決定」。 現在讓我說一個成功的設計。 同一個博物館的另一區，有一面「情緒牆」。 你站在牆前，系統會掃描你的臉——不是真的分析情緒，而是給你一個顏色。 每個人的顏色都不太一樣。 但顏色不是立刻出現的。 大概等了兩秒——然後它慢慢浮現出來。 在這兩秒裡，每個站在牆前的人都沒有動。 他們在等。 他們相信顏色一定會出現。但他們不確定會是什麼顏色。 三個馬上可以用的方向 第一：不要立刻給回饋。 加入一個 0.3 到 2 秒的「思考時間」。 讓互動看起來像「系統在決定」，而不只是「系統在檢測」。 壞掉的燈 vs 正在決定的燈——後者讓人更想站在那裡等。 自己試試看：30 行做出「延遲反應」的燈 // p5.js — 試試延遲回饋的感覺 let lights = []; const DELAY = 12 ; // 幀數延遲（約 0.2 秒） function setup () { createCanvas ( 400 , 400 ); for ( let i = 0 ; i < 5 ; i ++ ) { lights . push ({ history : [], lit : false }); for ( let j = 0 ; j < Math . max ( DELAY , 1 ); j ++ ) lights [ i ]. history . push ( false ); } } function draw () { background ( 30 ); let hovered = floor ( mouseX / 80 ); for ( let i = 0 ; i < lights . length ; i ++ ) { lights [ i ]. history . push ( hovered === i ); if ( DELAY > 0 ) lights [ i ]. history . shift (); lights [ i ]. lit = DELAY > 0 ? lights [ i ]. history [ 0 ] : ( hovered === i ); } // 畫燈泡 noStroke (); for ( let i = 0 ; i < lights . length ; i ++ ) { fill ( lights [ i ].

What's the Password? has a simple concept: To solve each of the game's more than 100 puzzles, you have to type in the right four-digit password on a number pad. That might sound like a limited constraint. But the simplicity gives solo developer Dan DiIorio, better known as TrampolineTales, lots of room to play with […]

Want to turn a small ESP32 board into a mini arcade game you can actually play? This ESP32 OLED Mini Shooter Game uses a 128x64 OLED display and two push buttons to create a simple shooter experience. The player moves left and right, bullets fire upward, and enemies fall from the top of the screen. It is a small project, but it already feels like a real handheld game once the display starts updating. This build is a great next step after basic OLED and button tutorials. Instead of only printing text or drawing one shape, the code manages several moving objects at the same time. It tracks the player, bullets, enemies, collisions, and game-over state. The screen is divided into a simple grid. The 128x64 OLED becomes a 16x8 playfield, where each tile is 8x8 pixels. This makes object movement easier to understand because the player, enemies, and bullets move by grid position instead of raw pixel math. Why build it? This project teaches interactive programming on real hardware. The ESP32 reads button input, updates game objects, checks collisions, and draws the next frame on the OLED. That is much more active than a normal sensor display project. It also teaches timing without blocking the whole game flow. The code uses millis() to control when bullets and enemies update, so they can move at different speeds. This is useful because many embedded projects need timed actions without stopping everything else. What you'll learn ESP32 OLED display control - drawing text, squares, circles, and game objects on an SSD1306 screen. Custom I2C pins - using Wire.begin(5, 19) so the OLED uses GPIO5 for SDA and GPIO19 for SCL. Button input handling - reading two push buttons for left and right movement. Debounce logic - preventing one press from being counted many times. Grid-based game design - turning a 128x64 screen into a simple 16x8 game map. Game object arrays - storing multiple bullets and enemies with active/inactive states. Timer-based updates - using millis() to move bullets

We’re finally getting Grand Theft Auto VI, poised to be one of the largest gaming releases in history.

A quiet experiment in Bluetooth, offline communication, and why we gave up too much when we handed our conversations to the cloud. The last time I was truly unreachable, I was in a place with no cell signal and no Wi-Fi. And I realized something strange: I had no way to send a message to the person sitting three feet away from me — because every app on my phone needed the internet to do it. That felt wrong. We've built the most sophisticated communication technology in human history, and somehow it all routes through a handful of servers in Northern Virginia before reaching someone in the same room. So I built Bluetoosh. The Premise: What If the Network Was Just… You and Me? Bluetoosh is a peer-to-peer messenger that runs entirely over Bluetooth. No internet. No servers. No accounts. No cloud storage. Just two devices, talking to each other the way devices were always capable of doing — directly. You open the app. You see who's nearby. You start a conversation. That's it. No phone number required. No email verification. No terms of service asking you to agree that your metadata might be used for advertising. The only network involved is the six feet of air between you and the other person. Why Bluetooth? Bluetooth is one of the most underrated communication protocols we carry around every day. Your phone already has it. Your laptop has it. Most people use it for headphones and nothing else. But Bluetooth is capable of much more. It can discover nearby devices, establish encrypted connections, and transfer data — all without touching the internet. The range is roughly 10–30 meters in open space. That covers a room, a floor, a campsite. Bluetoosh uses both BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and Classic Bluetooth, plus Google Nearby Connections for mesh-style discovery. In practice, this means you can find people around you, chat, share files, and even make voice calls — all completely offline. What It Actually Does Here's what surprised me most while building this: offline co

Hi, I'm Hugo. I built MinecraftServers-List.com — a Minecraft server directory that ranks servers by genuine player votes and uptime. Why I built it Most existing Minecraft server lists have the same problem: the rankings are easily gamed. Server owners run scripts to inflate their vote counts, and players searching for a good server end up with a list that reflects who has the best bots, not which servers are actually worth playing on. I wanted to fix that. What makes it different Vote integrity — votes are tied to real player sessions and IP validation, making bot voting significantly harder Uptime monitoring — servers that go offline lose ranking visibility automatically Player reviews — verified players can leave reviews with star ratings, giving prospective players real signal Java & Bedrock — both editions listed and filterable by gamemode, version, and country The tech stack Built with TanStack Start (React SSR), Supabase for the database, and deployed on Cloudflare Workers. The SSR approach was important for SEO — server listing pages need to be fully rendered for Googlebot to index individual server pages properly. What I've learned so far Getting a new directory site indexed by Google is genuinely hard. The challenge isn't technical — it's convincing Google that hundreds of server listing pages are individually worth indexing when they all share a similar template structure. The solution has been enriching each server page with structured data (VideoGame schema with AggregateRating), genuine user reviews, and making sure every page has a meaningfully unique meta description generated from real server data — version, gamemode, player count, country. Still a work in progress but the site is live, servers are actively listed, and players are voting daily. Try it If you run a Minecraft server, you can list it free at https://minecraftservers-list.com If you're looking for a server to join, the SMP list and survival list are good starting points. Happy to answe

A few additional markets will get the lower fees this year ahead of a global rollout in 2027.

Looking for family fun this summer? You need these WIRED-recommended Prime Day board game deals.

The biggest Switch 2 exclusives so far have largely been about scale. Mario Kart World introduced a wide open continent to race across, Donkey Kong Bananza let you smash basically everything around you, and Pokopia brought an expansive Minecraft-style creative experience to the Pokémon universe. Star Fox is different. A remake of a Nintendo 64 […]

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam I've been in online queer communities for a long time, and one thing that's always stood out is the endearing obsession with pop culture. The artists, the music, the fashion, the references. Every form of art gets appreciated, deeply analyzed, and celebrated. Diva Academy is an attempt to reflect that energy and honor Pride month and the pop culture that comes with it. What I Built Diva Academy is a pop culture trivia adventure. You play as a fresh face entering a campus where the currency is knowledge. The questions cover everything from ballroom culture and drag history to Beyoncé's discography and the origins of the Pride flag. The game runs in sessions: NPCs challenge you to timed trivia battles. Reach your REP(utation) goal to win, or hit zero and you're out. Earned REP converts to permanent currency between sessions, making it a rogue-lite-lite-lite experience where you gradually get stronger even when you lose. The game is built with vanilla HTML5 Canvas, CSS, and JavaScript. It features: 6 explorable rooms 4 NPC tiers - Starlet , Diva , DJ , and Mother - each with distinct personalities and increasing difficulty A rival system where a recurring NPC named Vex Vivienne spawns across the map and hunts you down A permanent perk system where REP earned in each run converts to permanent currency for buying perks like Grace (forgive one wrong answer), Clutch (survive at 0 REP once), and Haste (extra time on the timer) A Spotlight mechanic - defeat a Diva-tier or higher NPC and you earn a one-time 1.5x REP buff for your next face-off Two minigames - Hangman (guess the pop star name) and Pop Connect (link two artists through a mathematically perfect, AI-grounded collaboration graph with look-ahead validation) The Turing Challenge - Archivist Alan tests your ability to distinguish real pop culture quotes from AI-generated fabrications A customization system that unlocks new dress and hair colors as you defeat NPCs An

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam Archive — The Last Historian of Humanity What if history wasn't discovered... but selected? History is often treated as something permanent—something waiting to be uncovered. Archive asks a different question: What happens when humanity loses the ability to tell the difference between truth, memory, and fabrication? You play as the final Archivist after the collapse of civilization. Humanity's knowledge survives, but it has become fragmented, contradictory, and corrupted. Your responsibility is no longer to preserve everything—you must decide what deserves to be remembered. Every decision changes the civilization that will inherit your version of history. What I Built Archive is a narrative investigation game where players reconstruct humanity's past by examining historical memories, investigating evidence, resolving contradictions, and deciding what becomes official history. Unlike traditional mystery games, there is rarely a perfect answer. Instead, every investigation asks questions such as: Should conflicting memories be preserved? Is stability more important than truth? Can compassion justify rewriting history? If no one can verify the past, what does "truth" even mean? Each recovered memory is presented as a historical article. Players investigate through classified documents, research papers, witness testimonies, forensic reports, personal journals, and government archives before making irreversible decisions. Those decisions reshape the civilization that follows. By the end of the game, players don't simply receive a score—they discover the kind of society they created. Why It Fits the Theme The June Solstice represents a turning point. It is the moment when one season gives way to another, when light begins yielding to darkness, or darkness begins yielding to light. Archive explores a similar transition. Not between seasons... but between certainty and uncertainty. Human civilization reaches a moment where

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam Link to Game Home Page - here Link to Game Docs - here What I Built Heliograph is a short 2D solar-noir platformer. You are a courier who wakes with no memory on the summer solstice , the longest day of the year — the one day the sun is supposed to never quite die. A cracked handheld computer flickers on in your hand and tells you the truth: tonight the sun will set, and a relay station full of light has one unfinished message left to send before the dark. Sunlight is your battery and your map — it refills your light cell and reveals the route. Shadow hides you from the station's machines, but it slowly drains you, so you can never simply wait. Every screen is a negotiation between expose, charge, traverse, hide, decode. The core puzzle is a light relay . Most of the station is dark. Standing in a live sunbeam, you trip a relay that throws the light forward — a beam snaps to the next aperture, that beam comes alive, its cipher glyph becomes readable, and the chain continues until the final relay powers the exit terminal. You are literally carrying the light deeper into the ruin one beam at a time. Skip a relay and the road ahead stays dark and unsolvable. The jam theme is the solstice — light and darkness, and the passage of time. Heliograph is built entirely out of that tension: Light vs. darkness is the core mechanic, not a backdrop. Light is power, information, and danger at once; shadow is safety that costs you. The passage of time is the antagonist. The whole game is one long solstice day bleeding into night, and the message has to leave the station before dark. The station is a heliograph — a real Victorian device that sent Morse code by flashing sunlight off mirrors. Light is the message. There are no cutscene dumps. ACE, your handheld guide, narrates the opening, and after you decode each level's keyword — SUN → ARC → LUX → RAY — ACE decrypts one more fragment of the truth: why you're here, that you may not

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam What I Built The Imitation Game The Imitation Game is a real-time multiplayer social deduction game inspired by Alan Turing's famous Imitation Game the thought experiment that eventually became known as the Turing Test. Most people believe they can easily tell the difference between an AI and a human. They assume AI is too perfect, too logical, too fast, or too obvious. The Imitation Game challenges that assumption. Players enter a live chat room convinced they'll spot the machine within minutes. Then conversations begin, suspicions form, accusations fly, and certainty starts to disappear. Was that awkward response written by a human, or an AI trying to sound human? Was that emotional story genuine, or generated? Was the player who stayed silent suspicious, or simply distracted? By the end of a match, players often discover that identifying an AI is far harder than they expected. The real question isn't whether the machine can fool people. It's whether people are as good at detecting machines as they think they are. Instead of a single human interrogating a machine, players are placed into a live chat room with other participants and asked a simple question: Can you identify which player is actually an AI? Hidden among the players is a Quanbit , a rogue artificial intelligence from the year 3026 . Its mission is simple: blend in, appear human, avoid suspicion, and survive. The challenge for human players is equally simple, but far more difficult in practice. They must carefully analyze conversations, voting patterns, response timing, and social behavior to determine who among them is secretly the machine. The game currently features two distinct modes, each designed around a different style of deception. Eyefold Eyefold is the purest form of the game's Turing Test experience. Players enter a room where one participant is secretly a Quanbit. Conversations unfold naturally, and everyone is free to discuss any topic.

My submission for the June Solstice Game Jam: A 3D endless runner where you chase the sun with React Three Fiber and the Gemini API.