Sophie
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sophies.games
Sophie
@sophies.games
180 followers 91 following 700 posts
Programmer, game developer.

Always using the correct amount of cynicism.

https://sophies.games

Wishlist ROBOT RECKONING:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3174820/ROBOT_RECKONING/
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sophies.games
I don't really get why but apparently this discord message was good enough to deserve a pin
the point I'm making is that I am both correct and English
November 20, 2025 at 1:18 AM
sophies.games
Getting overexcited seeing a potential checkmate I played Qe4, losing my queen in one move. Just the way it goes, I suppose.
November 16, 2025 at 1:17 AM
sophies.games
In this position, Nd4 is the best move for white because you can take black's queen on the next movie - she's completely trapped. I didn't realise this *at all* while playing the game. What move did I play instead?
November 16, 2025 at 1:17 AM
sophies.games
meanwhile this is what my chess games look like 😭
November 10, 2025 at 1:21 AM
sophies.games
threw up in my mouth a little 🤢
November 4, 2025 at 3:59 PM
sophies.games
Oh, cool, no need to keep playing, I've Completed Halo.
November 2, 2025 at 7:51 PM
sophies.games
whole interview is a banger, but these lines really take the cake for me
So we lost that source of discipline and we lost one more source of discipline, the last one, the one that held the line until the very end, which was tech workers. And tech workers were incredibly scarce. They were incredibly productive. There’s a National Bureau of Economic research paper that estimates that the average tech worker was adding $1 million dollars a year to their boss’s bottom line. And so, that’s why there was free kombucha and massages and stuff. It wasn’t because they liked programmers. It was because they wanted these people who could walk across the street and get a better job to stay where they were and work every hour that God sent. And so they did. And the problem with relying on a sense of mission from your workers to motivate them is that they feel a sense of mission. So, when you say, “Well, it’s time to enshittify that thing, you missed your mother’s funeral to ship,” they’re like, “Well, no, I’m not going to do that and you can’t make me. And you can’t hire someone else who will do it either because there’s no one else on the job market who can do it.” So fast forward a couple of years, tech workers think that they’re temporarily embarrassed founders, they don’t unionize when they have the chance. We got half a million tech layoffs in three years and now tech bosses don’t have to worry about what their workers have to say. They’re saying fire like 90 percent of your radiologists who have a $30 billion per year wage bill in the United States. It’s a good number, right? Find a hundred of those people and you’re cooking. A hundred of those professions you’re cooking. But they’re saying fire 90 percent of your radiologists. Have the ones that remain rubber stamp the radiology reports at a rate that they cannot possibly have examined them and then turn them into the accountability sink when someone dies of cancer, right? So you look at all of those foundational problems with AI and you look at the answers that the AI sector has, like maybe if we keep shoveling words into the word guessing program it will become intelligent. Well, that’s like saying maybe if we keep breeding these horses to run faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Intelligence is not word guessing with more words. They’re unrelated to one another. It is a separate problem to solve. It’s not that word guessing programs can’t do impressive things. It’s just that they can’t do the things that justify a $700 billion CapEx and OpEx that is so high that even if you could zero at the CapEx by taking all these companies through bankruptcy and selling off their assets at 10 cents on the dollar, no one could afford to run those models anyway because no one would pay enough for the things that those models are producing.
October 30, 2025 at 11:05 PM
sophies.games
The way it works is it's literally just a particle system dropping translucent white squares on a black background. This creates a range (0 to 1, black to white) which, using a filter I placed on top, can be mapped to a colour gradient. The filter also adds a tasteful vignette!
October 29, 2025 at 3:19 PM
sophies.games
Made a background for my game. I think it looks pretty neat!
October 29, 2025 at 3:19 PM
sophies.games
somehow fell into replaying Halo Reach again, and man, they were really cooking with the blocking/lighting/cinematography on the cutscenes.
October 29, 2025 at 2:37 AM
sophies.games
should really have disclosed the friendship, but this critique of Zitron is true regardless. in his work he focuses a lot on the individuals running tech companies and very little on the history or social forces that make them the way they are.
October 27, 2025 at 8:46 PM
sophies.games
not sure I'd call it a grift - as the piece notes, his feelings seem to be genuine - but after reading this piece I definitely feel a lot better about being blocked by him for making a similar critique of him.
October 27, 2025 at 8:34 PM
sophies.games
6. A lot of the complaints about remake are the art direction, and I think Infinite just nails it. This looks so good! And so Halo!

7. Oh, and the gameplay too. Just so tight and satisfying, everything is incredibly well-tuned. Less floaty than older titles but still feels like one of them.
October 26, 2025 at 8:54 PM
sophies.games
Most popular politics podcast in the UK being paid to say how great AI in government is, now you can't trust anything they say.

This is why @theverge.com has an ethics policy!!!!

@reckless.bsky.social
October 25, 2025 at 4:55 PM
sophies.games
The piece was about Bigmode, Dunkey's publisher, and how its launch video hit me as a game developer shortly after launch.

Given recent events I figured it makes sense for me to preserve the piece on my blog, and I couldn't help myself so I've updated/edited it.
sophies.games/blogs/597e80...
Perspective From 2025: This was cut from the original piece, partly for brevity and partly to keep things from getting even more negative, but something a lot of publishers do is they avoid risking investment on early-stage games, and only publish games that are already near-complete and gaining some online traction. So when it launched, I expected that Bigmode (due to the lack of experience and aforementioned conflict of interest) would stick to safe bets like that, and 3 years on, that's what they've done. Animal Well fits that profile exactly, and Star of Providence was literally already released when they got to it. This is ultimately fine I suppose, but if they want to live up to promises made in the launch video, and bring games to light that would not have been made or seen otherwise, then they'll have to start taking risks. Charitably, maybe this was always the plan, and now they have some experience they're going to start taking more risks, but then it's weird they didn't say as much if that is the case. Uncharitably, maybe this is just a vanity project and Dunkey likes putting his name on cool games.
October 22, 2025 at 11:45 PM
sophies.games
October 16, 2025 at 9:51 PM
sophies.games
Working title: TELATRO

#gamedev #indiedev
October 14, 2025 at 9:28 PM
sophies.games
Went to play this game earlier today and it seems like the logo was updated last month. What's Ubisoft doing, updating the branding for a 15 year old game?

steamdb.info/changelist/3...
October 12, 2025 at 10:07 PM
sophies.games
Goodbye, Hades 2. Hello, Hades 2!
September 27, 2025 at 12:55 AM
sophies.games
if jesus died for our sins again today, this is how he'd do it #skate
September 17, 2025 at 10:41 PM
sophies.games
the new skate game rules. so happy to get another one of these!
September 16, 2025 at 11:31 PM
sophies.games
RIP to all the devs who delayed their game to 4 weeks after Silksong
Hades 2: September 25th, 2025
September 12, 2025 at 1:58 PM
sophies.games
since everyone's got Silksong Fever, I've decided, for the third time, to try and get into Hollow Knight, and I'm definitely kind of into it this time round! We'll see how it goes.

One thought on the game design: (see reply)
September 9, 2025 at 11:07 PM
sophies.games
@chevyray.dev hey, I used your Armada font in my game, check it out! 😄
August 4, 2025 at 10:10 PM
sophies.games
was remarking on the fact that TRON: Ares' soundtrack is by "Nine Inch Nails" and not "Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross" like their other film soundtracks, and..

@mikebithell.bsky.social
Sophie saying on Discord "it definitely communicates that the music is going to have a real identity. a real.." followed by an image of the TRON: Identity logo, and someone posting a series of laughing emojis ended with a tired emoji
August 3, 2025 at 4:55 PM