A player sent us what looked like a contradictory report: their runs were saved in local history, and the game showed a comparison rank during play, but their best run was missing from the leaderboard list.

This happened while working on Stunt Pals, our Android animal-launch game. We had three things that looked closely related: a record saved on the device, a rank estimated during a run, and a place confirmed by the online board. The screen needed to explain which one the player was seeing.

One board, with optional login

We moved from relying on the platform's public leaderboard to an app-owned board. Players enter a unique nickname and opt in; connecting Google is a separate, optional step for recovering their ranking identity. It isn't a full cloud save or purchase backup.

That added work: handling duplicate names, supporting Korean, English and Japanese input, and providing reporting, hiding and deletion controls. We also had to distinguish pending, confirmed and failed submissions. A successful button press alone doesn't tell the player whether the score was saved online.

Daily needs one shared clock

For a worldwide daily challenge, resetting at each phone's local midnight would put different people on different days under the same heading.

We gave that mode one reset time: midnight in Korea, UTC+9. Its map, conditions and leaderboard use the same day, with daily scores kept separate from all-time bests. Local daily missions can still follow the device's date.

We also added checks for late responses. A result from yesterday's board, or from the identity used before an account connection, should not replace today's list.

What we learned

Owning the board means more responsibility. For us, it helped to separate the player's local history, shared ranking identity and confirmed online result instead of presenting them as one thing.

If you've added online rankings to a small game, what helped you make pending versus confirmed scores clear without cluttering the result screen?

A short edited gameplay clip for context:

https://reddit.com/link/1x898dq/video/tw4e9cwnv0wh1/player

Stunt Pals is free on Android, with ads and optional in-app purchases.

Google Play: Stunt Pals – Animal Launch

This update brings a lot of new additions next week, including a whole new perspective for the engine!

I thought I was close to being done. I had added all the new features I wanted, and all that was left was to polish everything... until I saw the RPG Maker U2U trailer.

And I'm like, well, look at that... If my competition has upped their game, then so must I!

So, introducing MMO Studio 0.7.0: The Diorama Update!

I've been working day and night on this update, with the new 2.5D perspective taking center stage, along with a few other major additions to the engine.

The screenshots were taken while I was building out the system and trying to match what I saw in RPG Maker U2U. The update is still a work in progress, but I thought I'd share what I've got so far!

What's New

• Turn-Based Combat: Player battles in both PvE and PvP.
• Moves System: A new interface that l

a coworker of mine has been making single-request decode for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B faster on one H100 where I work, and the megakernel he set out to build kept coming out slower than plain kernel launches

the idea was one persistent kernel that streams weights across operations and layers instead of stopping at hundreds of kernel boundaries. part of it worked, a persistent dense chain was 4.4% faster than separate launches. but the full MoE block was still about 4% slower after multiple rounds, and a full layer was 9.5% slower

the reason was that one kernel config had to serve very different operations, and it lost more per-op efficiency than it got back from prefetching across them

the launch cost settled it. inside a CUDA graph a launch boundary costs about 1 microsecond, so paying it was cheaper than the barriers needed to avoid it. the failed versions still paid off, they exposed a race condition and 2 measurement bugs

so the tuned kernels stay as separate launches, and the next big gain has to come from speculative decoding. with MTP the stack is already 50% faster than stock SGLang on the same GPU

feels close to the draw call batching argument, merging work only pays while it removes more than it adds. anyone hit the same wall in their own projects?

he wrote up what worked and what lost on our blog, if you want the details: https://www.coralbricks.ai/blog/ai-latency-engineering

Check out the full video: https://youtu.be/CFkDQlB5kdk

In this devlog, I go over the differences between the disciplines of environment design - the look of a game level - and level design - the gameplay of a game level. Oft the two are conflated but environment design is much more visual (and so makes for better gifs and short videos) whereas level design exists in an abstract, conceptual space and concerns actions, consequences, emotions, and possibilities.

Hey everyone!

We just dropped Demo Update v0.2.0 for Champion of the Lore, and I wanted to share one of the changes I'm most excited about.

A lot of you pointed out that having to click a "Play Card" button every single time made combat feel clunky and slow. You were totally right. We listened, went back to Unity, and completely removed that extra step. Now you just select your card, click your target, and boom—faster turns, cleaner flow, and way less unnecessary clicking!

Honestly, seeing the game get smoother and more fun directly because of player feedback is one of the coolest parts of this whole indie dev journey.

If you want to give the new combat flow a spin (or check out the rest of the update, like our brand new Settings menu!), the free demo is live on Steam:https://store.steampowered.com/app/4178300/Champion_of_Lore_Demo/

Hope you like it! 🌿

Bitiverse Studio is out today, and it's free.

It's a game creation system for Windows, built in the spirit of STOS, the game creator that taught a lot of us to make games on the Atari ST. Everything you need to make a 2D game is in one program: a pixel sprite editor, rooms and maps, animation, sound effects, music, and game logic you snap together like building blocks. Press Play and your game runs right there.

Why STOS? Because it got one thing right that a lot of modern engines lose: you could go from nothing to a running game in an afternoon, and every part of the job was in one place. I wanted that feeling back, with today's comforts. So Studio is offline, needs no account, and keeps your projects on your own computer.

The logic is blocks first. You snap together when-this-happens and do-that blocks, and when you want more, a script block takes JavaScript. Kira's tutorial games walk you through it, from a first room to a finished platformer.

The whole post, with what's in the box and how the extension disks work: https://fortisq.itch.io/bitiverse-studio/devlog/1708920/bitiverse-studio-is-out-a-1988-style-game-creator-made-in-2026

Este pequeño momento, luego de solo concetrarme en esto durante dias sin ver la luz del dia, al fin se logro.

Que aprendi? a que el universo de Android, Linux y Windows se puede conectar, luego de semanas de desarrollo y no ver la luz del sol. Ah y haciendo un motor agnostico interno en C++20/ASM

Discord del proyecto: https://discord.gg/6Q6FCpYM77

Hi all. Last week I introduced Kaldra, a Minecraft server I'm developing solo, and said teleportation would be very limited. This week I'll go through what that actually means: which teleports exist, how horses work, and how the Flightpath network works, along with the reasoning behind each one and how they're built.

On most servers I've played, distance doesn't mean much. You teleport to a friend, teleport home, teleport to fresh land, and the world turns into a set of waiting rooms between teleports. Nobody meets anyone on the road because nobody uses the road.

On Kaldra the world is kept small on purpose, and I want crossing it to matter. If your town is far from a Tower, that's a choice you made when you settled. If you carry your gold across the map, someone might be waiting for you. Travel should take some planning, and it should carry some risk.

Teleports

There's no /home, /tpa, /warp or random teleport. The one teleport every player has is back to their own town, with a short warmup that's cancelled if you move, take damage, or are in combat state. Getting home is easy; getting anywhere else means traveling.

Nomads don't have a town, so they get a camp instead: a bed placed in the wilderness that they can return to every so often. The catch is that anyone who finds it can break it.

Horses

Horses are the main way to get around. Every player can buy one personal horse from the horse merchant at spawn, and there are no wild horses in the world, so the merchant is the only source. When you call it, it gallops in from a distance instead of appearing at your side, and it follows you around when you get off.

You can upgrade its speed, jump and saddlebags with gold, and choose its skin. Saddlebags can't carry gold, so your money still travels with you.

Your horse is not invulnerable. Outside of safe zones other players can kill it, and if they do, whatever was in the saddlebags drops. You keep the horse itself, its upgrades and its skin, and you can call it again after a while. Losing your ride should hurt, but not so much that you stop riding.

The Flightpath network

For long trips there's the Flightpath network: Towers spread around the map, each with a flight master. Talk to one, pick a destination on the map, pay in gold, and a mount flies you there. A flight takes around 3 minutes, depending on distance.

Flights only go between selected destinations. You can't fly to an enemy town, you can't take off in the middle of a fight, and the price grows with distance, so it's a convenience you pay for, not a free replacement for traveling. The mount can't be hurt, but you can, so flying over hostile land isn't completely safe either. If you really need to, you can jump off mid-flight, but there's no refund and the fall is real.

The default mount is a wyvern. Other mounts exist as cosmetics only, following the same routes at the same speed.

How it's built

Horses and flights are two custom plugins I wrote for the server, using MythicMobs and ModelEngine for the mobs and models.

Limiting teleports started with limiting commands. Instead of blocking the commands I don't want, players get an allowlist: they can only type the few commands they need, and everything else is hidden and blocked, including namespaced versions like minecraft:tp. Plugins and NPCs can still run commands on the player's behalf, which is how the flight master opens the destination map.

For flights, I wanted the state to be robust. If you disconnect mid-air, the flight pauses where you are and resumes when you log back in, and it also survives a server restart. A flight that dumps you in the ocean because the server rebooted would make people stop trusting the whole system.

Fares are calculated from the distance between stations instead of being set by hand, so adding a new station doesn't mean pricing every route again. They're paid in physical gold from the player's inventory, since gold items are the currency.

What I'm hoping for is a world where roads actually get used, where you might pass another town's riders on the way to an event, and where settling close to your allies matters.

Next week: Economy. How gold works as the currency, where it comes from, and what you spend it on.

For anyone who has designed travel in a game: how do you make fast travel cost something without it feeling like a tax players just resent?

It feels like I'm really starting to see gains on the skill acquisition front, and I'm super excited about it! I've started on the orc creation part of the course I was working in last week. I've gotten a good way through the first sculpting section, a process that I've discovered I absolutely LOVE.

This is the first time that I've found some transferable skill from my preexisting art hobby. The anatomy knowledge from drawing is helping me move pretty quickly while still getting a good result for this portion of the course.

As for my debates from last week, I'm really leaning towards a standalone game built in Godot. We'll see.

Hey yall! We made a new Devlog focusing on our games artstyle :) Id love if you checked it out!

Hey everyone!

Today, we wanted to introduce you to Mister Gum, one of the characters we've been working on for MegaGum!

From the beginning, we wanted to create someone whose presence could be felt throughout the entire factory, even when he's not actually on screen.

His design, personality, and way of speaking went through quite a few iterations. We wanted his appearance and the environment around him to tell you something about who he is before you even properly meet him.

And while we've already shared a few glimpses of him, there's still a lot you haven't seen!

Now we'd love to hear your thoughts!

What do you think of Mister Gum's design? What kind of personality do you imagine he has just by looking at him?

We're really curious to see what first impressions he gives you!

If you're interested in following MegaGum's development, here's our Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4111300/MegaGum/

Second devlog of Proyecto Vil (video in Spanish, gameplay speaks for itself). New this week: charged dash attack, a living village with night raids, and the first boss, La Marrana Madre: telegraphed charges, breakable pillars, a phase 2 with icor pools and ring attacks you have to roll through. Feedback welcome!

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working solo on a 2D game for 6 months, and I finally decided to start a devlog.

The idea: You play as a knight who wakes up with no memories. He doesn’t know his name, why he carries a sword, or which side he fought for. As you explore, you slowly recover fragments of his past, and not all of them are memories he’ll want back.