Eric Raio

What a phenomenal RDC 2025!🔥 This year’s Roblox Developers Conference (held Sept 5–6 in San Jose) was packed with major announcements, and I couldn’t be more excited by the direction the platform is heading: • Roblox Moments: A built-in short-form video feed for capturing highlights and instantly sharing them across the platform, think a TikTok-style discovery tool tailor-made for Roblox. • Creator earnings boost: DevEx rates increased by 8.5%, putting more cash back into creators’ pockets. • Huge growth metrics: Over $1 billion paid out to creators in the past year, with daily active users climbing toward 112 million. • Emerging tech & safety upgrades: From acoustic simulation and hydrodynamic enhancements to emissive mapping, CSG on meshes, and server authority for anti-cheat measures • Infrastructure & community support: A new data center in São Paulo is now live, improving latency for Brazilian users, and the platform is reinforcing its commitment to safety with over 100 updates and better age-based moderation. This year, Lootbloc turned up with some unforgettable moments: • Partner Dinner: We hosted a special dinner for our 60+ partners, an opportunity to connect, eat great food, and relax after a long RDC weekend. • Claw Machine: We partnered with the Roblox Commerce team to have our Lootbloc-branded claw machine featured at their booth, where attendees could win merch • Luau Plushie Launch: We unveiled an exclusive Luau whale plushie with Roblox, themed after the Luau logo that attendees could earn by completing a scavenger hunt at the Luau booth • Co-hosting Quataun party Friday night at RDC where we gave away thousands of plushies, shirts, hats and more to fellow developers. Lootbloc is only continuing to grow by bringing on new partners this year like Piggy, Pls Donate, Murderers vs. Sheriff Duels, Twin Atlas and more! Bottom line: RDC 2025 wasn’t just about big tech announcements, it was a celebration of community and all of the successes this past year. I’m so excited by the possibilities ahead, and inspired by how platforms like Roblox and partners like Lootbloc continue to grow together. Here’s to next year, bigger, bolder, and even more connected.

67

📢 Google just dropped Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite — and it’s built for scale. This isn’t a frontier model. It’s a production workhorse. 💰 $0.25 / 1M input tokens 💰 $1.50 / 1M output tokens ⚡ 2.5× faster Time-to-First-Token ⚡ ~45% faster output vs Gemini 2.5 Flash 📊 86.9% GPQA Diamond 📊 76.8% MMMU Pro 🏆 ~1432 Elo on Arena Perfect for: 🔤 High-volume translation 🛡️ Content moderation 📊 Structured data extraction 🌐 UI/dashboard generation It even supports adjustable reasoning levels — so you control cost vs thinking depth. The “bigger model = better results” era is fading. Available now in preview via Google AI Studio & Vertex AI. #AI #GoogleAI #Gemini #LLM #AIEngineering

11

💡Again, do not take the model response as the truth when you can see the actual process behind the hood, if you are trying to understand how LLMs work. If anything, go read up on System Prompts. Prompt Engineering is a thing.

1

1 Comment

Crimson Desert's console launch was delayed from Q4 to Q1. "Console certification" was among the reasons. This is my guess of what happened. Pearl Abyss is the developer behind Crimson Desert. They're primarily a PC/mobile developer attempting their first major console launch. Mobile platforms have certification, but it's looser than what you should expect on consoles. What this looks like to me: they planned their release based on PC development milestones, not giving separate time after PC gold master for the console side of things. PC version goes gold before console version goes gold. Unless you consider your weakest platform your lowest common denominator throughout development - then you'll set yourself up to be positively surprised. Working on PC and console simultaneously is smart. You can ship them at the same time if you plan far in advance and have adequate support. The console needs its own time between being PC-ready and launch. Certification alone can take weeks. Multiple platform holders mean multiple certification processes. If you DO account for this, you set yourself up for a solid multiplatform release. Which means increased visibility and revenue. My advice: Start planning your console milestones when you're in the alpha stage. You don't need to start porting yet, but you need to start planning. Do those plans before you plan your release date. And remember to plan for all the holidays and shutdowns along the way. Trust me. Pearl Abyss likely didn't know what they didn't know. Got excited, announced a quarter too early. If you are planning your launch, Dreamloop can help you with a little reality check here and there if you need it.

28

1 Comment

The reality is that every engineer is becoming a tech lead with a crew of agents. In that world, the primary job shifts from writing code to coordinating work: tasks, context, handoffs, and verification. That likely calls for a new kind of UI, one that feels closer to Kanban, Jira, or Asana than a traditional IDE. We don’t know yet if Intent is the final winning approach, but I’m excited we’re shipping a research preview instead of standing still. PS: What’s one small, recurring pain in your daily workflow? Drop it in the comments. If it’s a good fit, I’ll build a prototype with Intent and share what we learn.

7

GDC 2026 Wrapup (2 of 2): A Shift in the Craft In Part 1 I covered what I learned at GDC this year. This one's more personal. I've spent 30+ years working professionally on traditional game AI. Behavior trees, GOAP, utility AI, finite state machines, genetic programming, neural networks, battle pattern matching and tactics, etc. That was my craft. GDC used to include a two-day AI Summit with multiple overlapping sessions to choose from throughout. This year you could count the traditional game AI sessions on one hand and still have fingers to spare. In the Game AI Roundtable, one of the few surviving AI sessions, people kept steering toward ML and LLMs while the host kept pulling it back to traditional game AI. It felt like watching our community process the loss in real time. I know I was. The Fireside Chat with Damian Isla and Jeff Orkin hit the same note. Veterans reminiscing about what felt like the golden age of traditional game AI. I knew some of those people from previous GDCs. Worked at some of the same companies. Bittersweet is the right word. But the PUBG Ally session I mentioned in Part 1? An AI buddy that learns your play style, remembers your favorite weapons, talks to you in combat through two-way voice? That's where it's all heading. And honestly, it's exciting even for someone who grew up in the old school. What I'm Taking Home Between the two posts, here's what I'm bringing back to the studio for The Realm: Return Home: - AI companions and villagers you can actually talk to and who learn from you - Adaptive music that matches gameplay, layering tracks and crossfading between themes so the soundtrack reacts to what's happening in real time - Polish and marketing fundamentals so our players can actually find us on Steam - VR gesture-based interactions that skip the controller entirely - Steam localization to reach a wider audience - And a personal favorite throwaway: texture-trained neural network shaders that dramatically improve both compression and fidelity at the same time 25 sessions. 20-30 pages of notes. A head full of ideas and a craft that's changing under our feet. It's a strange place to be, but exciting at the same time. What sessions stood out to you? #GDC2026 #GameDev #GameAI #IndieGame #VR

3

The Video Game History Foundation just released audio recordings from the 1989 Game Developers Conference. 300 people in a Sunnyvale Hilton. Trip Hawkins arguing about Nintendo's licensing practices. Richard Garriott on game design philosophy. Danielle Bunten Berry on multiplayer. These tapes sat undigitized for 37 years. What strikes me: in 1989, developers were already debating whether the NES would "go on forever." They worried about hardware obsolescence, platform lock-in, and creative freedom. Sound familiar? The same conversations we have today about app stores, platform fees ... they were happening when the biggest console had a 1.79 MHz CPU and 2KB of RAM. The technology changes. The business tensions don't. If you work in gaming or tech, these recordings are worth your time. Not for nostalgia. For perspective on how little the fundamental debates have shifted in 37 years. #GameDev #Preservation #RetroGaming

1

1 Comment

Star Labs have created a "web driver" suite https://lnkd.in/g3Mm_utP for Star Micronics devices. An idea Reilly Grant has long advocated for and Michael Rumely helped partner on. This helps application developers more easily deploy cross platform web WebUSB. The library wraps core web assembly library code. The http://web.dev/devices APIs continue to grow in usage - and companies developing official libraries to help application developers use their devices securely at lower development costs.

6

I never post here, but it seemed like the only space with people who may understand. Running a "hobby" site dedicated to indie games is rewarding in some ways, but absolutely aggravating in many others. Perpetually fighting with the chicken/egg problem of how to get more traffic when generally featuring games nobody has ever heard of is sometimes plain exhausting. Just wish Nintendo themselves, or I suppose Golin (on their behalf) would see the value of what I've been consistently doing for nearly 9 years now... but anyway. I sent this in response to a perfectly-reasonable disclaimer from a developer explaining why they may not have codes for me, just figured it was worth sharing some frustration. "Just wanted to potentially save you time, while also making a case for myself. I absolutely understand that you're likely swamped with requests, and that it makes sense to use what limited keys you have to reach the highest potential number of people.   That said, one of the reasons my viewership (despite having been around now for nearly 9 years) is that I'm the person running towards the fire that is discovery for smaller developers and indie projects... the majority of which nobody has heard of and that don't get a load of traffic precisely because people can't seek our or search on games they've never heard of.    Within a few months I'll be crossing over 5,000 games reviewed, and I give every game I play and share about the same chance, whether single-developer or triple-A. These days I share gameplay video for every game I review (something not enough outlets do, many seem content to include stock press images with their reviews with no other coverage), at least one short, a written review, a video review, and then for games that rate high enough they can be included in future feature videos, which include ones for sales as well as best of genre and best of the year ones as well. [Previous game of theirs I did review redacted] has probably been in videos of mine at least 50 times over the years all said. So I flatly agree that I don't meet the standard you all are hoping for, but the reason for that is that I'm trying to help bring exposure to games that don't get enough. Even for more known or popular games my continued efforts to keep reintroducing their names over the years also creates new opportunities to be seen, even long after they've collectively been lost in the pile of loads of new games every week. Just figured I'd make my case, it's frustrating that no matter the effort it's a struggle to reach people when I'm offering something they don't know about more often than not."

6

2 Comments