Fridayyy

working on a few new games. follow for more.

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

@TheCinesthetic Fred Again.

[Visa is doing marketing consults (see pinned!) @visakanv]

this review of Interstellar (2014) by @lauren_wilford is one of the best things I’ve read in a while

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

@IndieGameJoe this is the best and worst game idea ever

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

@metaslime_ @JensClaessens can vouch that @metaslime_ is the real deal haha

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

wearing all black is like cooking w/ only olive oil and salt

completely uncreative, but always great

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

@japan_nobunaga if it wasn't remarkable, why would people watch it in Japan for 30 years?

[𝐀𝐮𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐤 (𝐒𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐇𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐧) @Aurumek_]

I don't want to create a brand - I want to create a world. ✨️🌿

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

I’m making a show about buildings.

The concept is simple: do for the man-made world what Planet Earth did for the natural world.

But, when I pitched the idea, the answer was that nobody would watch it.

So I released a pilot episode on YouTube. It’s got 5.4 million views, 379k likes, and 23k comments.

People are interested, and now it’s time to make the full show.

Six episodes, filming in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the USA, and releasing on a streaming service like HBO, Netflix, or Prime.

Why does this show matter?

First: we’re surrounded by buildings all the time. Look around yourself, right now… what do you see? Buildings are the logical conclusion of everything a society believes in. That’s the real focus of this show: not the buildings themselves, but what they say about us.

Second: there’s global dissatisfaction with modern architecture. This feeling gets written about online, but nobody’s given a voice to it on film or TV. That’s what this show will be. But this isn’t just about criticising modernity. That’s easy. This is about learning from the past in order to understand and improve the present, for everybody.

Third: there’s a drought of high-quality culture shows. When I spoke to film executives they said that only documentaries about sports, music, or true crime get funded. That’s a colossal missed opportunity. Galleries are always full, content about architecture goes viral online all the time, and people spend their precious holidays visiting beautiful cities.

Why no shows about architecture, then?

Tourists flock in their millions to see (for example) the buildings of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. But, if you asked those same people if they’re interested in “architecture”, they’d probably say no.

To put that another way: not many people want to watch “a show about architecture”, but lots of people want to watch a show that illuminates the real world they’re living in, each and every day.

What will the show be like?

Six episodes, going chronologically through history and arriving at the present, each focussing on the architecture and design of a specific period:

1. Middle Ages
2. Renaissance
3. Enlightenment
4. The Nineteenth Century
5. Art Nouveau & Art Deco
6. Present Day

But, in each case, the point isn’t just to learn about that era; the point is to learn about our modern world through those eras and what they’ve left behind. If you watch the pilot episode (included below) you’ll see what I mean.

So the show’s not really “about” the past; it’s about the twenty-first century.

That’s why it’s called The Modern World.

When you think of a typical history show there are loads of interviews, stock footage, archive photos, historical recreations, and graphics. We’re doing none of that. Everything will be filmed on location, because we’re telling our story only through the real world that exists right now. And, rather than going to the most obvious places, we’ll focus on buildings that aren’t well-known but should be more famous.

But that’s all big picture; what will it be like on screen?

Buildings used to look different in every country, and now they look the same. Why? Because the weather is different everywhere, and buildings were always a way of dealing with that weather, using local materials. Now we have air conditioning and we ship concrete around the world, so we don’t need to design our buildings with regard to local weather or rely on local materials.

Look at really old clocks and you’ll notice something: they don’t have a second hand… because it was only invented 300 years ago! Then you look at the present and you realise we’re surrounded by timers, by seconds ticking down and ticking up relentlessly. If we’re looking for a cause of our anxiety-inducing culture, that might be it.

When you spend time with the sun-softened bricks and time-warped timbers of old cities you notice that synthetic materials like plastic have taken over. When we’re surrounded by things that feel temporary, how do you think it makes us feel?

It’s only by seeing 19th century train stations, designed like cathedrals, that you realise tradition and technology aren’t enemies. New things don’t have to look boring: if the Victorians had designed AI data centres, they’d look like Medieval castles.

In the 1920s, at the zenith of Art Deco, people believed technology would uplift humanity. That’s why they decorated their buildings with statues inspired by electricity. Only by seeing their enthusiasm can we realise our own cynicism, and perhaps begin to fix it.

All of that… and much, much more.

But, above all else, this show is about a way of seeing. If you want to understand any society then you need to look at what it creates, not what it says about itself.

There’s a worldview in every single object; our skyscrapers are designed the same way as our phones. Learn to look at this world, to notice its details, and everything else starts to make sense.

What now?

I’ve been quiet online recently because I’ve been researching and working on scripts for six full-length episodes. Production begins when we’ve raised the funding.

The Modern World is coming.

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

Every software engineer is just someone who wanted to make video games, then realized what they really wanted was to get paid

[Kelindi @_kelindi]

every software engineer is just someone who wanted to make video games and quietly gave up on that dream

[Panflip Studio - Stack Order Demo out! @PanflipStudio]

We wanted our deckbuilder to feel like a living graphic novel, so everything in it is hand-animated ✍️💫

#indiegames #gamedev #animation

[Pixel-boy @2Pblog1]

Our asset pack focused on VFX is now available:
https://t.co/GVWd6cSjt1

#gamedev #indiedev #pixelart

[Dan Fessler @DanFessler]

Just bought this awesome thing to use as physical knobs/sliders for painting in photoshop.

It rocks, so I had to share a video

[Zach Klein @zachklein]

Richard Nadler's work is my personal catnip.

https://t.co/R49rZlK1vU

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

@iOSLife it's a pretty standard autobattler system.

in terms of learning how to design a game like this, id find a game you love and read everything you can find about the systems/stats and try to recreate it yourself.

OR maybe try a tutorial or RPG maker to start?

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

fun gameplay loop looking for a soul

the gameplay and systems are fun, but village building is completely flat

asset packs took us far, but it's time for an upgrade

looking for a pixel artist with taste. itch below

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

@Dimitirinhas i added you - let's dm.

also, id love to get your thoughts on the prototype https://t.co/Kc254EQ6jx

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

@liquidfrogg like go counter clockwise?

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

@signulll spending 5 min to type up bullet points before a call is the correct amount of preparation 95% of the time

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

@gamearttales Haha, I think most people are cool with supporting devs as long as the price feels fair compared to the competition

I’m always happy to pick up games to support my fellow devs, though I don’t always have time to complete them

[Fridayyy @fridayyy_dev]

https://t.co/Kc254EQ6jx

gameplay, balancing, and art feedback would be greatly appreciated!