Someone reached out a few days ago, trying to sell me “dctechevents.com”– which once upon a time was the domain for my DC Tech Events site.

Have I grown to like dctech dot events?

Yes.

Am I nostalgic for the old domain?

Also yes. But not $500 nostalgic.

Thankfully, my friend S here didn’t actually own the domain. When they wrote that email, the domain was in PendingDelete status, which is final. Whoever had owned it, stopped paying the bill. Once a domain has reached PendingDelete, nothing can stop it from eventually hitting the open market. At that moment, S might as well have been trying to sell me the Brooklyn bridge.

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I have a theory about creation with AI.

(wait! please come back)

My gut says this can’t be original, but I haven’t seen it exactly expressed anywhere.

1. The best art (and I’ll extend this to products in general) reflects the taste and discernment of just one person, or at least very few people.
2. LLM’s represent the antithesis of that, the voice of the masses, and perhaps worse: the voice of the masses digested by a deflavorizing machine.
3. The skill in creating with LLM’s is then to remain in charge, to make sure YOUR taste and discernment are dominant. If this effort gets in the way of creating, then the LLM is harmful to your endeavor.
4. Code has the opposite dynamic! You generally want the most generic, boring, un-creative implementation of a thing, unless you’re trying to break new ground in computer science. The voice of the masses is an asset.

I think one way to navigate #3 (at least for digital projects) is tool building, using AI not to necessarily make the thing, but make to make peripheral tools that improve your life or make creating more productive or pleasant. For SpinDoc, I don’t plan on using AI for graphics, game design, level design, etc– but the level editor is a place where “taste and discernment” doesn’t matter so much (at least not yet), and letting the LLM do most of the work on that has been helpful to me.

So, instead of putting the SpinDoc level editor aside, I dug in and now the thing generally works. I even got online level sharing to work: it spits out a URL that anyone can use to play your level. That’s something I’ve been day-dreaming about for over a year.

Next, is making the game more presentable and fun, and I’ve got some ideas for new puzzle mechanics and a whole new game mode I’d like to try.

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According to itch.io analytics, on most days, at least one person visits Brakes Escape. I suspect it’s just one person, who has made it one of their favorite time wasters. I think that’s cool! None of my other games exhibit that sort of steady usage pattern. It’s a small impact, but… it’s impact.

Even without that data point, BE is one of my games that I think should be developed further. It definitely wants to be a mobile game– I just have to get rid of the “frame” (borrowed from it’s most direct inspiration, NS Tower) and make it a full (tall) screen experience. From there, the graphics are pretty raw, and there’s room for power-ups and enemies of some sort I think.

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Exactly a year ago, I declared that 2025 would be the year of 3D. Not so much– it became a year of worrying about my job and finding the next one, and games took a back seat for most of it.

My goal: 2026 is going to be a year where I finish something, outside of jams. Maybe I’ll take a jam entry and try to make it into a complete, polished thing, or one of my other experiments or projects (remember the roguelike? Spindoc?), or it’ll be something from my notebook, or maybe a brand new idea.

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