The Game Beyond

Level design is really hard. It feels like I'm cooking. I have some systems to cook with, like inventory, enemy, and combat, but the result can be totally different depending on how I combine and balance them.

Do you know what player type you are? Take the free test and find out! playertype.thegamebeyond.com

CAN’T WAIT FOR MEDICARE-FOR-ALL!   “A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. “At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said ‘if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday.’ “He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. “Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. “He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. “He told an interviewer: ‘I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way.’ “The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.” —Tweet by @multiplanet1

Here's how to get Gemini 4 Argon to ACTUALLY build games that look decent (aka have taste) You see amazing looking Argon games on your timeline... But when you try it out yourself, the results are... bad? It's not that Argon can't do it... you just need to try this approach.

made a rug for your desktop so you can sweep your mess under it

🚨NEW EXPERIMENT 🚨 Playground is an experimental gaming platform that lets you create your own games with zero coding experience. If you can think it, you can play it. Go to labs.google/playground to learn more! Available to users 18+ in the US.

Gaussian splats let you choose the camera move after you've left the location. We added animation tools and 4K video export to Spatial Studio, all in the browser. Here's the result, followed by how we made it.

Here's Grok 4.6 prototyping a tennis game level using both Unity and Blender. Still trying to nail a good Unity CLI x Blender MCP workflow. I like to ask Grok to make these edits 'live' so that I can see the assets and game come to life in front of me.