Ember's Feed Aggregator

Eternal Odyssey, Sunsoft’s Japanese rebranding of Hong Kong developer GameOne’s PC RPG Eternal Saga begins with two teenage friends practising …

A many years ago, the IF Archive existed, and it was an FTP site. It lived at ftp.gmd.de. That was a long time ago. (1992, but who's counting.) Slightly less long ago, the World Wide Web existed, and I said "I bet there could be a web mirror ...

The 1990 original was a deeply impractical monster of a machine, Galaxian 3: Project Dragoon intended to be a grand …

I think every gaming company should have their own crossover fighter. Capcom have quite a few of them, encompassing everything …

A few days ago, Kate Willaert wrote: As much as I love the word "Metroidvania," I dislike people calling these games Metroidbrainias because it makes it sound like their root is in Metroid games when they're just standard Adventure games in ...

Who takes an engrossing 3D roguelike and then decides to follow it up with an adventure based on a published …

What happens after an ace pilot defeats a huge glob of an alien entity and then flies back to base? …

When Apple shipped the first ARM ("Apple Silicon") Macs, they came with Rosetta 2: a tool which allowed existing Intel apps to run on ARM. One day, Rosetta 2 will go away, and Intel apps will die. (Just like 32-bit apps died in 2019.) When? ...

Dustborn is a queer punk-band secret-agent road trip with campfire singalongs plus beating up fascist cops with an electric baseball bat. What else is there to say? C'mon. About twenty years ago, a mysterious Broadcast freaked out most of North ...

Layoffs at a game studio aren't news any more, but I guess I'm on this beat. If nothing else, this blog has a longer searchable history of Cyan history than Cyan does. Yesterday Cyan posted one of those all-too-familiar dark-mode press releases: ...

So much for writing all about my teaching journey, huh?

My thoughts and first impressions of the Zen Browser!

My methodology and reasoning for making a blocklist to finally clean up unwanted content from search engines!

I talk about my experience and impressions of getting a Vita in 2025. Spoilers: I really like it!

A personal list of great free software that I use in my daily life

It's been a very long time since I've posted anything here--don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you all; it just turns out that the first year as a teacher is extremely time-consuming.

So I finished FF8 after 22 years It’s a long time to finish a game. I bought this game from a friend as a kid when I was around 12 in 2002. It was my first story-rich JRPG (I think the other JRPG I played was Pokemon at the time). I fell in love at the time. FF8 was pulling me in with a story and a world I could never have imagined.

[This piece is co-authored with Vsevolod Livinskii.] Formal verification isn’t some sort of magic pixie dust that we sprinkle over a computer system to make it better. Real formal verification involves a lot of the same kind of difficult, nasty, grungy engineering work that any other systems-level job involves. Furthermore, the verification tools themselves are […]

Dice’n Goblins is still advancing steadily. This month, I’ve received the help of my partner Seto, and a bunch of stuff is moving at a greater pace. On my side, I finished designing, scripting, and filling the levels 4, 5 and 6. The scenario for this part have been written as well. The game have a main story, but each set of level have their own storyline. This particular set focus on your companion Skelly, and his old friends.

As I prepare to take my terrifying leap into hackademia, I've been freelancing a lot more lately—both as a way to freshen up some of my more rusty skills (Directing leaves little room for slinging code or technical writing), and as a way to offset some of the lost income (teachers are criminally underpaid in this country, so please hire me).

I first made this announcement on my LinkedIn, but I felt it was appropriate to post something specific and more detailed here because the amount of support I have received from you, the tens of readers of my blog, has always been overwhelmingly positive.

Time for another devlog, it has been a while. About Steam Page The big news for this month is that the Steam Page was up. It took me a lot of time, because I would overthink stuff a lot, and the requirements are numerous. The days following the opening were spent mostly on social media, telling people to wishlist it. Quite surprisingly, a Japanese website, Gamespark picked my game from the constant stream of Games, and I got a lot of wishlists from it.

This tooks a while, but I finally can present you my game! It will be released on Steam. I would be really thankfull if you wishlist it!

Been hard at work the last few weeks! I’ve started to design the 4th level, and some passages will be underwater. Like Labyrinth of Galleria or Operancia, you will have limited oxygen to explore those areas. I’ve worked a full day on the transition from air to water, and it got some positive response online so I’m happy about this. Underwater There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it.

Compilers can be improved over time, but this is a slow process. “Proebsting’s Law” is an old joke which suggested that advances in compiler optimization will double the speed of a computation every 18 years — but if anything this is optimistic. Slow compiler evolution is never a good thing, but this is particularly problematic […]

In its original form, a peephole optimization applied to a collection of instructions located close together in a program. For example, in a register transfer language we might find this sequence of instructions: r0 = xor r8, -1 r1 = xor r9, -1 r0 = and r0, r1 Here, assuming the two’s complement representation, -1 […]

[This piece is co-authored by Ryan Berger and Stefan Mada (both Utah CS undergrads), by Nader Boushehri, and by John Regehr.] An optimizing compiler traditionally has three main parts: a frontend that translates a source language into an intermediate representation (IR), a “middle end” that rewrites IR into better IR, and then a backend that […]

[This piece is coauthored by Yuyou Fan and John Regehr] Mutation-based fuzzing is based on the idea that new, bug-triggering inputs can often be created by randomly modifying existing, non-bug-triggering inputs. For example, if we wanted to find bugs in a PDF reader, we could grab a bunch of PDF files off the web, mutate […]