Tess Snider

Tess Snider

@malkyne.com

Fairy codemother. Free-range veteran game programmer and underground programming teacher. Co-owner of indie game studio Hidden Achievement.

1.9K followers1.1K following5.5K posts

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"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform... Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with." -- Ada Lovelace

It was a classic Gen X disaster. She sprained her ankle, and her coach expected her to vault, anyway. She managed to grit her teeth and pull out a win, and this moment became a great cause celebre, so nobody learned any lessons.

I can't LinkedIn post, because I'd be like: I once accidentally came to rule an entire clan of vampires at a LARP I wasn't even in. This kind of leadership is forged, not inherited: Here's how you too can go from not having a character sheet to Queen of the Malkavians in one weekend.

One of my challenges for the rest of this life is to never make a teal UI for any in-house sci-fi game. This is not somebody elseโ€™s sci-fi game. It is ours. And for the love of cats, it doesnโ€™t need to be teal. Youโ€™ve seen that game already.

My key was originally on a boot lace around my neck. Eventually, that was replaced with a chain along with my grandpa's dog tags.

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Tess Snider reposted

Feeling down about the AI focused re-launch of a certain game jam? fear not, I am putting together a week long gamejam celebrating Human Made creations, come join us and make some cool stuff in the Hand Crafted Jam. itch.io/jam/hand-cra... #GameDev #IndieDev

itch.ioHand Crafted JamA game jam from 2026-11-12 to 2026-11-26 hosted by Dylan Browne. Welcome to the first Hand Crafted Jam, a Game Jam all about Human Made Games and things because Human Made art rules and we should cele...

I was playing such a weird hodgepodge of little one-shots and mashups that I am not even sure what my first five were. My first campaigns were Amber Diceless, Ars Magica, Vampire TM, Rolemaster, and Champions... I think?

John Harper@johnharper.bsky.social

My first five ttrpgs in the order I played them: 1. Gamma World 2. Marvel Super Heroes 3. Star Wars D6 4. Talislanta 5. Call of Cthulhu (+Champions, Cyberpunk 2020, and Paranoia, all overlapping -- not quite sure if CoC was first.)

The whole idea in That Comic that AI is the difference between being a sustainable indie and an unsustainable indie is risible. The primary thing that makes a sustainable indie is figuring out how you're going to survive when your game goes nowhere, which will usually be the case.

That's one of the reasons you don't do your "dream game" first. You don't know what you're doing, you have no following, and your first game is probably going to flop.

If you don't have a plan for what to do when your game doesn't make money, you shouldn't quit your day job. That's not to say that you shouldn't make your game -- you totally should! Just make sure you have an alternate source of income.

One of the most frustrating things in ADHD is when youโ€™re trying very hard to hold a bit of information in your working memory long enough to use it, and then it slips away, replaced by nothing but a glob of anxiety. It feels like it was important. What was it? Why didnโ€™t I write it down? WHY?

Also, if you have the grave misfortune of being on LinkedIn, Amir is a good person to follow about labor/career topics in the industry.

There's something of an interesting paradox where traditionally, the programmers who work on invisible infrastructure tend to be underappreciated and at-risk, because people can't see the work they're doing, and when it's working best, you aren't aware of it at all, BUT...

Ironically, when a bunch of less-technical people are banging out code with agents, I think that infrastructure programmers are going to be more valuable, because they know about things that an unskilled person doesn't even know how to describe.

Sometimes, in the process of making things, you have happy accidents that give you whole new ideas for more things, and this is magnificent.

Mike Meyer@rainbowheadmike.bsky.social

I didn't mean for the debug lines to look like spider legs but it's kinda neat

Tess Snider reposted

Since the details were a couple deep in the last repost: for all the indie devs out there running it, dopresskit / presskit() is a php app and you probably want to figure out a replacement or take your presskit sites down until it's updated.

nightshade โ†’home, for now@nightshade.technology

details leaked. this vulnerability is a full unauthenticated unconditional remote code execution exploit against any service running on a PHP version from 5.4 until latest yeah if anything deserves CVSS 11, this is it. this is CATACLYSMICALLY bad.

Can you imagine if people at multiple clothing brands suddenly said: "Yeah, we use child sweatshop labor to make our clothes. Everybody does! It's time to just deal with it. If you're a clothing company and you're not doing this, get out of the business."

Before any angry reply rolls in, I'm not saying that using AI to develop game software is ethically equivalent to child sweatshop labor. I'm using it more as an illustration of the fact that this isn't a silly way to try to move the overton window.

Can you imagine if people at multiple clothing brands suddenly said: "Yeah, we use child sweatshop labor to make our clothes. Everybody does! It's time to just deal with it. If you're a clothing company and you're not doing this, get out of the business."

Before any angry reply rolls in, I'm not saying that using AI to develop game software is ethically equivalent to child sweatshop labor. I'm using it more as an illustration of the fact that this isn't a silly way to try to move the overton window.

Even knowing that a lot of clothes are made unethically, consumers are still unhappy about that. They certainly don't want you encouraging more companies to make clothes unethically.

When I was at uni, I was on call for an entire building for any computer problems they might have. I got called into a lab with some serious grownup science guys, and they told me that the video on one of their computers wasn't working...

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I noticed that the monitor cable was hanging loose, so I went to plug it into the VGA card, and there was NO CARD. Just a gaping hole. "It looks like there's no video card," I explained. "Oh yeah," said one of the scientists, "we put that in one of the other computers."

The first horrifying moment in "The Exorcist" is watching a bunch of people haphazardly swinging picks at an archaeological dig.

What the heck is going on with the tap water in Austin right now? Mine tastes like muddy moss tea, even after filtration.

This is the kind of doom-loop that gen-AI forms with everything it is both trained on and used for. It's like a greedy parasite that feeds until the host dies, dooming them both.

Alanah Pearce@alanahpearce.bsky.social

If AI takes over video game guides to such an extent that we lose all guide writers... where's it gonna steal the guides from? If nobody's making guides to begin with (because it's no longer profitable, since all of that work is immediately stolen), there's no data for the AI to steal.

Even if you resolved all the other negative externalities somehow, I can't get behind it, because of this problem. We can't afford to have journalism, art, and everything else go into a death spiral, because no one can afford to originate anything anymore.

People don't talk much about how much we actually kind of enjoyed the .com bust. Lots of visited a website called FuckedCompany that tracked all the catastrophes as they unfolded. There were dead pools. We were having a lot of laughs, while everything burned around us.

People don't talk much about how much we actually kind of enjoyed the .com bust. Lots of visited a website called FuckedCompany that tracked all the catastrophes as they unfolded. There were dead pools. We were having a lot of laughs, while everything burned around us.

Some of that was because we recognized that a lot of these companies were turkeys, with no plausible business model, and it was irritating that they were even getting VC funding. We wanted people to pay a price for all that irrational exuberance.

So, it was genuinely satisfying to see the market smack some of these companies around. It was delightful to visit the office of a bankrupt company that spent all their investment money on expensive decor. It was a deep well of schadenfreude, even while it upended many of our careers.

Watching a player who is very icon-blind playing a complex RPG is like watching a horror movie where you're yelling at the characters. "The icon is THERE. It's RIGHT THERE. Next line down, third one in. Don't you are say you don't have that power. No, wait, don't close the menu!"

My Dad complained to me a lot about icons when he started using Windows, back in the day. I think he might have had some icon-blindness problems, too. He ended up playing WoW really hardcore as a Druid years later, so it must be possible to overcome that.