Jacob Repp

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

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This is absolutely true. I would also add that just because AI decreases cycle time does not mean you should operate without a plan. To use an analogy, pretend you are going on a trip from New York to Los Angeles and fuel/electricity are free (or only cost pennies). Now imagine that you don't have a map but are just driving based on instinct. Because you are moving and the cost is low or zero, you feel you are getting somewhere even when you are not. You need a map (app or paper), or at least need to stop for directions occasionally. Movement, no matter the speed, is not progress unless it's toward where you want to go.

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𝐂𝐓𝐎 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬 (post 1 of 2) In the games industry, a Technical Director’s most important tool isn't a compiler: it’s translation. If your non-technical peers (Designers, Producers, and Executives) don’t understand why you’re making a technical decision, it’s not because they aren't "technical enough." It’s because you haven't translated the Technical Reality into Business Value. Here is the blueprint for technical communication that builds trust, reduces friction, and keeps the engine running through the chaos of game dev. ------------------------------------------------- 𝟏. 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐂𝐨𝐝𝐞; 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 "𝐕𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲" Your CEO or Producer doesn't need to know about a race condition in your multithreading logic. They need to know how it affects the Player Experience or the Development Timeline. • Don't say: "We need to refactor the entity component system because the cache misses are spiking." • Do say: "The current system is slowing down our iteration speed. If we spend 3 days optimizing it now, we will save the design team 2 hours of waiting for builds every single day for the rest of the project." 𝟐. 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐃𝐞𝐛𝐭 𝐚𝐬 "𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡-𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐋𝐨𝐚𝐧𝐬" Technical debt is an abstract concept to non-coders. Use the financial metaphor. Explain that taking a "shortcut" to hit a milestone is a loan. You get the feature now, but you pay "interest" every week in the form of bugs and slower feature development. Eventually, the interest becomes so high that you can no longer afford to build new features at all. 𝟑. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 "𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐏𝐢𝐯𝐨𝐭" 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐇𝐲𝐠𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐞 The most difficult communication happens when the Product Design changes. Suddenly, your "Interior Design" (the internal architecture) no longer fits the "Floor Plan" (the game design). • Be Transparent about the Ripple Effect: When a designer says, "Let’s make it multiplayer instead of single-player," they see a UI change. You see a foundation change. • The Analogy: "Changing this core mechanic is like deciding to add a basement to a house after the roof is already on. We can do it, but we have to lift the whole house up first." • The Strategy: Use Ed Catmull’s "Braintrust" model. Bring the designers into a high-candor session where you explain the why of the refactor. Show them that "cleaning up" isn't a luxury—it’s the only way to ensure the game doesn't crash on launch day. (cont...) #CTO #TechnicalDirector #TechnicalDebt #CommunicationSkills #ProductStrategy

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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."

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As mentioned before, I have been engaged in some mad science experiments in the lab, mostly embedding models in Unreal Engine to drive completely unscripted behaviors and interactions by actors in a game. I moved from 7b (7 Billion) parameter models to 0.5b (about half a billion) with no loss in quality. Well, a researcher at Samsung has produced a paper and code for a 7 MILLION (yes, million, with an M) micro model that claims to beat massive foundation models like Gemini 2.5 pro on ARC-AGI test scores. Less is truly more if game developers want to embed these capabilities on consumer GPUs. Current models eat half of the GPU memory budget. Tiny models like this 7m use less space than a texture some artists will add to a character. There is even a direct correlation with size and speed, even with more compute dedicated to recursion and iteration with this approach. The possibilities are promising. Of course, from a technical perspective, this is exciting. As a matter of a successful business focused on crafting delight, I am much happier to sacrifice a texture or two for unbefore seen capabilities that can manifest on low-end consumer hardware for a larger market and dramatically advancing the state of the art to deliver fun. Imagine as a writer or designer focused on world-building, you are more of a "Dungeon Master" specifying motives and capabilities of characters and narrarive rather than hard-coding actions, dialog and consequences to bring your vision to players! No two play-throughs would be identical, but true to the vision you want to bring to life in your world! It is recent, so we will see if "too good to be true" applies, but it is worth keeping an eye on. Paper and code repo are here: https://lnkd.in/g4CZZFJa

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Unity 6.3 LTS is here! This release delivers the long-term stability, verified ecosystem, and real-world performance optimizations developers need for confident production development. With two years of dedicated LTS support (three for Unity Enterprise and Industry), consistent updates, stable platform coverage, and smoother upgrade paths between Unity 6 versions, Unity 6.3 LTS is built for the way teams develop today! For the full technical breakdown - including how 6.3 was production-verified - check out our blog: https://lnkd.in/eJubt26g

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I trained my AI to code like me. Small steps. Tests before behavior changes. Commit early and often. Codex, Kiro, Claude... they all work well when you teach them to work in familiar ways. Sometimes it breaks stuff. But so do I when I'm coding. The difference is discipline not perfection. In December, before I started working again (in case you didn't catch that), I committed 22.8K lines of new code and removed 8K lines from my guitar tools. Not slop. Boring, readable, debuggable functions and classes. Mostly TypeScript, web, and UI code. I've taught it to work in 10-15 minute chunks. It codes. I do something else. When I come back, there are usually 10 or so commits waiting. Small, Tested, Reviewable. AI isn't magic. It's a multiplier. But you have to multiply the right things. Work within its constraints. Work within its context. The teams that struggle aren't struggling because the tools are bad. They're not framing tasks in terms the AI can succeed at. They're not telling it how they want it to work. I did. And now it more or less codes like me.

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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.

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People interested in graphics, give this a look. for me, the list is: * knowing a modern API like dx12, vulkan or metal * written a path tracer * implemented real time PBR * implementing a couple real time rendering techniques like: shadows, ambient occlusion, depth of field, TAA.

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We've been implementing Neural Texture compression in #Assassinscreedmirage. The overall benefit results in better quality textures for less GPU memory usage (links in the first comment). If you followed the topic since our GDC2024 presentation ,this a very practical application of La Forge's mission to bridge the academic world with Ubisoft. #ubisoft #ubisoftlaforge #innovation 👇 "If you've been thinking, like I have, that we're still some way off seeing AI being used in games for more than just upscaling or frame generation, then it's time to think again" (...) "Enter stage left, neural texture compression to cut down on that memory demand. Given the state of the DRAM and SSD market right now, you can bet your last dollar that a whole heap of game developers will be looking closely at what Ubisoft has done to see if it can help out in their games, too"

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Podonos just raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding, and the signal is loud and clear: the voice AI industry finally has someone measuring the sound, not just making the noise. Based in Los Gatos, Podonos is building the infrastructure layer that decides whether voice AI feels real, human, and ready for primetime. The industry is racing toward a projected $47.5 billion by 2034, but growth without standards is chaos. Podonos is making sure the hype actually holds up when you press play. At the center is ✦Soohyun Bae, PhD in Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and Y Combinator W22 alumnus. His track record stretches from engineering roles at Google Maps to leading AR mapping at Niantic, plus co-founding Bobidi and TickTock AI. He has seen what happens when technology scales without proper #guardrails. With Podonos, he's betting the future of AI isn't just about how smart the models get, but how believable and trustworthy they sound. Podonos evaluates models across naturalness, similarity, emotion, recognition accuracy, pronunciation, tone, and resilience. Add in #personaconsistency, and suddenly you're not just testing machines, you're testing their ability to pass as human. The twist? They deliver results in under twelve hours, when the legacy approach drags on for two months. In AI time, that's the difference between relevance and irrelevance. Investors caught the beat. Serac Ventures, led by Kevin Moore, took the lead, backed by NAVER D2SF, the venture arm of South Korea's NAVER, and KAIST Venture Investment Holdings. Together, they've now backed Podonos twice, with this $2.4 million round stacking on top of a $750,000 raise in March 2025. Total funding sits at $3.15 million, and every dollar is pointed toward scaling #engineering, refining #analysistools, and launching into the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia. This isn't theory. Podonos already serves Resemble AI, Play AI, and Sanas AI, hitting six-digit ARR by November 2024 with just four employees. Their secret weapon is reach: 150,000 evaluators spread across nine languages and thirteen locales, forming a human-in-the-loop platform that blends speed, rigor, and global coverage. That reach lets Podonos deliver evaluations at a scale and pace that no competitor has matched. The strategy is ambitious: expand into high-demand sectors like #healthcare, #finance, #gaming, and #advertising, then move beyond voice into #multimodal model evaluation, spanning video AI and large language models. The mission isn't just to check if AI works, it's to decide if AI works for people. #Startups #StartupFunding #EarlyStage #VentureCapital #PreSeed #AI #AIInfrastructure #Voice #VoiceAI #VoiceTech #Infrastructure #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #Hiring #TechHiring If software engineering peace of mind is what you crave, Vention is your zen.

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Could AAA multiplayer game be built entirely on a pure ECS engine? That's the technical deep-dive I'm considering for a conference talk. ECS offers a beautiful architecture for large-scale systems: data-oriented design, cache-friendly memory layout, and predictable iteration patterns. It challenges traditional OOP thinking in favor of composition, unlocking new levels of performance and clarity. But scaling it to AAA quality is a challenge very few studios take on — and that’s exactly what makes it worth discussing. I’m curious how the developer community views ECS in this context. Would an in-depth walkthrough of real-world ECS integration and problem-solving be something you’d like to see at #GameAccess26? If so, which topics would interest you most — architecture design, performance tuning, engine internals, or multiplayer challenges? Your feedback will help me refine the scope and depth of this session proposal. #GameAccess26 #gamedev #ECS #multiplayer #gamearchitecture

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