Ember's Feed Aggregator

You may have played this under its English name, Robotica, and may also recall the consistently middling to bad reviews …

I wasn't blogging in 2006, but I was a regular commenter on the Nielsen Haydens' blog Making Light in the year and on the morning that I read "Mike Ford is gone." I found the comment which I posted twenty years ago today: I saw him just one ...

War is bad, but fighter planes are cool. I’ve known this since I was a small child, badly gluing a …

I love dungeon crawlers. I love the thought of being right there in the thick of it, my party lost …

Three mysteries... or games which are mystery-shaped, at least. Plus one which doesn't fit the theme but does fit the symmetry group. The Mermaid Mask This Bed We Made Cognition Method He Who Watches The Mermaid Mask by SFB Games -- game ...

I haven’t actually checked, but I’m pretty sure there are as many different versions of Tetris as there are stars …

The period between the late ‘90s and the early ‘00s were an uncertain time for legendary RPG developer Falcom. RPGs …

Back in April I took a look at the Hugo Award finalists, with an eye to seeing how the votes might divide up. I did this because the 2025 Best Game voting showed an interesting split between "indie" and "big company" voters (in some sense of ...

September is upon us, and with it that least regarded of the early Infocom games: The Witness. As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of ...

I am always happy to see another Rusty Lake game. It's not a high-velocity studio, but they're reliably high-quality and enjoy experimenting with their chosen form. (Co-op gameplay! Short film!) I am also always happy to see another Rusty Lake ...

PlayStation announced that they will stop making discs. People are rightfully mad about this, but it's not actually about physical media. It's about owning your games.

In 2024, I announced that I was quitting my high paying tech job to become a high school computer science teacher. This Big Scary Thing™, as I called it, was a huge leap of faith; I had no formal experience in education, but I had spent years volunteering in classrooms and mentoring students, and had an opportunity to take a break from my burnout that I simply couldn't turn down.

Sometimes you just want to read without HR getting all judgy and putting you on a "performance improvement plan," so I recently decided to make a Visual Studio Code extension that renders eBooks as code in (18?) languages.

Dear friends, I present to you the next generation in software development: eval++!

There's a lot of shitty news happening lately, and I've been having trouble holding space for it all.

The year is ending, and I’m finding time to make an article. A long post about games I played this year. Of course, any of those games should have their own review. Dice’n Goblins took most of my mind on the first half of the year and it took me a while before I could palate harsher games. The shadows are growing longer on the world and in our era. As a result, I sometimes feels silly to spend my time playing.

Despite popular belief, you can run games off an NTFS drive - as long as you've set it up properly and are willing to take a risk.

It’s been a few months now, but Dice’n Goblins is out, on multiple platforms. You can buy it now on Steam or Fanatical. This was probably the hardest project I’ve ever done. It required thousands of hours of work and lived in my brain, for all the hours I was not working. Was it worth it It’s been 3 months and it generated a little bit of money. Enough to pay back production costs and pay for some expenses.

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!

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.

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.

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 […]