David Lindsey Pittman
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dphrygian.com
David Lindsey Pittman
@dphrygian.com
MAEK GAEM
Principal Engineer at @questiongames.bsky.social
Co-founder at @minorkeygames.com, making Eldritch 2
Guitar, vinyl, film, pro wrestling
Texas born, Nebraska raised, California made
Anti-fascist
✝️🏳️‍🌈

👤 he/him 🌎 Texas 🔗 https://dphrygian.com/
(I'll replace it with a real review, I promise.)
November 12, 2025 at 5:53 AM
November 12, 2025 at 5:52 AM
Since then, I've always made sure to pay anyone who works on anything I did, with two minor exceptions:
- One person who disappeared for a while; I paid them like 8 years later when I found them again
- One person who asked to work for free, but I still feel bad about that one (cough it's Xalavier)
November 12, 2025 at 5:35 AM
If anyone wants to buy me a Christmas gift, there's also this Johnny Marr signature Jaguar. www.fender.com/products/lim...
Limited Edition Johnny Marr Signature Special Jaguar®
Johnny Marr is best known as the strikingly dynamic guitarist-arranger-songwriter behind the Smiths, who redefined and ruled U.K. pop in the 1980s. A master of melody, layering and texture, Marr has b...
www.fender.com
November 12, 2025 at 5:25 AM
(Translators being paid fairly (or at all) is a whole other thing that I'm not going to get into tonight, but... back in 2013 when I released Eldritch, it was sort of normal to ask for fan translations. I did that, and it worked, but I feel queasy about it now. Translation is hard work. Pay people.)
November 12, 2025 at 5:16 AM
I've used aws translate to generate some strings so I could prove my loc pipeline, and I feel gross about that because I'm pretty sure it's AI. (When and if Eldritch 2 is translated to other languages, I will make sure it is translated by real people who know the material. And are paid fairly.)
November 12, 2025 at 5:13 AM
Reposted by David Lindsey Pittman
And one other thing: we’re being told that AI is the only way to make games cheaper and faster, to pull us from this precipice of production nightmares the industry has found itself in. That it’s necessary.

We put out roughly 3 motherfucking games a year, not touching the stuff.
Skill issue.
November 12, 2025 at 3:34 AM
I meticulously comment my code and it's *still* sometimes hard to fix bugs in things I wrote just 6 months ago. Imagine trying to fix something written by an AI years prior. No one you can ask about it, because no one knows how it works. What are you gonna do, ask the AI to fix it? It CAUSED this.
November 12, 2025 at 4:54 AM
I'm old enough to remember in 1998-1999 when COBOL programmers were suddenly needed to fix up a lot of Y2K bugs in old software. And they did, because smart people are smart!

I'm scared of the "we fucked up and we need some real programmers to fix the code we asked some AI to write" era.
November 12, 2025 at 4:51 AM
That's what software engineering is! You learn a concept, you construct a digital model of it in your head, you write the code to express that model, you test it, you refine it, you ship it. If you're asking an AI to skip those steps, you're not learning anything! You're not contributing anything!
November 12, 2025 at 4:45 AM
I honestly can't even comprehend asking an AI to write code for me. Like, sure, I'll look up algorithms on Stack Overflow or whatever, but then I'll *learn* them, understand them, and write the code myself. Then I know what it does! I can debug it! I can explain it to other people!
November 12, 2025 at 4:42 AM
I wrote a bit about those tools here:
www.dphrygian.com/wordpress/?p...
www.dphrygian.com/wordpress/?p...

I learned so much about so many different things making these tools, and they're *mine*, made for me, to do the things I want in my games. That's neat.
The Style – MAEK GAEM
www.dphrygian.com
November 12, 2025 at 4:27 AM
In case anyone ever asks, I *have* written a material generator and a music generator for Eldritch 2, but that's not AI. That's me taking all the things I personally know about those things, and writing my own tools to make the process a little faster and easier for myself. It's still 100% me, baby.
November 12, 2025 at 4:15 AM
This show desperately needs a human villain to ground the fear. A Henry Bowers-type bully for the kids, a villain in the military hierarchy, some real teeth to the racism angle, or SOMETHING. It's surprisingly flat and kind to all its characters so far.
November 10, 2025 at 3:42 AM
Those circa 2000s Disney CGI ghosts, straight out of The Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean. That's not IT.
November 10, 2025 at 3:23 AM
Best intro to a TV show I've seen since LOST, and I have faith in Gilligan and co. that it's going somewhere.
November 8, 2025 at 12:21 AM