games

Check it out Today’s four puzzles are inspired by chess. (If you haven’t yet watched the recent documentaries on Judit Polgár and Hans Niemann , I recommend them.) 1. Oddities Continue reading...

_Well Played_ 15 (1):3-14. 2026About halfway through Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the relentless tactical espionage action is interrupted by one of the most remarkable pauses in video game history. For nearly three minutes, the protagonist Snake climbs a ladder—alone—as a haunting a cappella version of the game’s theme song plays. Though seemingly uneventful, this moment is cha…

From As Nasty As They Wanna Be to Saltburn and The Full Wax, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz 1 What is the most populous city directly on the Mediterranean coast? 2 Which ruler last had a coronation in 1963? 3 What school subject, abbreviated, is plural in Britain but singular in the US? 4 Which married couple have 12 Olympic golds between them? 5 Gatsby, Gowen and Tibbs were which est…

Abstract With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, Virtual Reality–Embodied Conversational Agents (VR-ECAs) are increasingly regarded as a promising approach to psychological support. However, existing research has not yet thoroughly examined how the social identity of ECAs and the type of Virtual Reality (VR) environment influence users’ cognitions and behavioral…

Driving sims were overtaken by open world fantasy adventures, but new upgrades show how much joy there is in the genre I have spent the last week careening around Japan in a Porsche 911, seeing the sights, racing other cars and occasionally veering off the road to plummet through an ancient bamboo forest. You all know what’s coming next … this wasn’t in real life, folks – it was in Forza Horizon …

What If Your Phone Addiction Was Actually Building an Empire? (A Game Dev Story) We all know that feeling. You pick up your phone. 30 minutes later, you're three rabbit holes deep on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit. You've scrolled through hundreds of posts. Nothing's changed. You haven't learned anything. Your thumb just got a workout. And you're probably not the only one. The average person spends 3 …

We recently released a 2D precision platformer on Android, built around a simple question: What happens if the player doesn't control jumping? In most platformers, jumping is the core mechanic. It’s reactive and immediate. You press a button, and you jump. In Crom's Escape, the character jumps automatically. The player controls only movement, timing, and positioning. Why remove jump control? The …

I just finished the quest The New War. I chose Operator over the Drifter. What happens as a result of either the decision I took, or choosing the Drifter?

🎮 TCJSGame Update: The Future is Being Drawn A New Version. A Possible New Name. We're excited to announce that TCJSGame V4 is in active development —and with it, we're exploring a significant change: a rebrand to Limn Engines . Nothing is final yet. But we wanted to share where we're heading. What We're Working On TCJSGame V4 (Codename: "Sonic") The next version is already taking shape with majo…

Pixel art is far more than an old-school graphic style it’s a precise and powerful artistic language for indie game developers. Whether you’re working with Unity, Unreal Engine, Defold, or Godot, learning the fundamentals of pixel art can help you create a unique visual identity for your game. In this article, we combine the golden tips from Juniper’s pixel art tutorial with the intelligent capab…

Ahead of the 70th grand final on Saturday, it’s time to test your knowledge of Europe’s biggest pop spectacular. But can you sort your Loreen from your Vanilla Ninja? Good evening Europe – and good morning Australia! It’s that time of year again, when most of mainland Europe plus a few other countries gather to decide which three-minute pop spectacle will lodge itself in your brain for at least t…

This research introduces ArASL-EduNet for bi- handed static Arabic alphabet hand-gesture recognition from RGB images. The framework is built on a curated dataset of 11,200 labeled images covering 56 balanced gesture classes derived from the 28 Arabic letters, with distinct left- and right- hand realizations for each letter. Four deep learning models were evaluated under the same protocol: CNN, Mo…

The premise Most mobile games compete on stimulation: timers, streaks, daily missions, push notifications. We wanted to go the opposite direction. Off By One has exactly one mechanic: a grid of near-identical geometric shapes, one slightly wrong. Find it. No countdown. No lives. No nudge to come back tomorrow. How it works technically Drawing is handled by SwiftUI Canvas. Shapes and decorations a…