A Castle Built From Random Rooms is a work in progress/early access/demo version of a full game that’ll probably never exist. But if it does exist, it will be
basically the same as this, but on a grander scale, and include the following features:
– over a hundred random rooms instead of about ten
– character jobs and descriptions that actually add individualised effects/skills/starting equipment and so on
– special pre-chosen characters with particulalrly challenging stats levels for extra difficult challenges
– more stats! more items! more use of the stats and items within different rooms to create different outcomes!
– high scores and loot rankings and possibly even achievements of some kind
– less bugs (aspiration)
– decent endings (stretch goal)
What the game almost certainly won’t ever have:
– any semblance of quality or coherence
– sound and/or music
– monetary success
It’s a Twine-like choose-your-own-adventure, but with the rooms randomly shuffled each time, in sort-of a semi-rougelite way. Some imaginative work in this. And the art style is
wonderful!
Blender Studio’s official game project is a short casual interactive story. Play a big, adorable dog traversing through winter woods and help out a little kid decorate a snowman
with colorful items hidden in the environment.
…
…
DOGWALK is a free, open-source Godot game for Windows, MacOS and Linux, produced and given to the world by Blender Studio as a way of
showcasing some of their video lessons. The beautiful, playful “papercraft” models were made by making actual hand-painted paper models of the assets, unfolding them,
scanning them, and then re-folding the maps back into in-game assets, which is an amazing and imaginative approach.
It was released a little over a week ago, and it’s a short but adorable little game.
Y’all seemed to enjoy the “overworld” map I shared the other day, so here’s another “feelie” from my kids’ ongoing D&D campaign.
The party has just arranged for passage aboard a pioneering (and experimental) Elvish airship. Here’s a deck plan (only needs a “you are here” dot!) to help them get their bearings.
In preparation for Family D&D Night (and with thanks to my earlier guide to splicing maps together!), I’ve finally completed an
expanded “overworld” map for our game world. So far, the kids have mostly hung around on the North coast of the Central Sea, but they’re picked up a hook that may take them all the way
across to the other side… and beyond?
Banana for scale.
(If your GMing for kids, you probably already know this, but “feelies” go a long way. All the maps. All the scrolls. Maybe even some props. Go all in. They love it.)
You’ve probably come across GeoGuessr already: it’s an online game where you (and friends, if you’ve got them) get dropped into Google Street
View and have two minutes to try to work out where in the world you are and drop a pin on it.
Can you tell where we are, yet?
A great strategy is to “walk around” a little, looking for landmarks, phone numbers, advertisements, linguistic clues, cultural indicators, and so on, narrowing down the region of the
world you think you’re looking at before committing to a country or even a city. You’re eventually scored by how close you are to the actual location.
Cheating at GeoGuessr
I decided to see if ChatGPT can do better than me. Using only the free tier of both GeoGuessr and ChatGPT1, I pasted
screenshots of what I was seeing right into ChatGPT:
ChatGPT confidently assessed the geographic clues, translated some text that it found, and eventually made a guess down to a particular street in St Petersburg.
That’s pretty spooky, right?
The response came back plenty fast enough for me to copy-and-paste the suggested address into Google Maps, get the approximate location, and then drop a pin in the right place in
GeoGuessr. It’s probably one of my most-accurate guesses ever.
This isn’t a one-off fluke. I tried again, this time using only a single photo, rather than one pointing in each direction on the street:
Again, the text recognition and translation capabilities of the AI were highly useful, but it was helped by architectural and cultural clues too.
This time, it wasn’t quite right: the actual location of the photo was Chittagong, not Dhaka, about 200km away.
But that’s still reasonably spectacular from only a single vantage from a single point.
Don’t think I’d have done better, though.
Obviously my approach here was crude, but it’d be relatively easy to, for example, implement a browser wrapper that cheated on-your-behalf: while playing GeoGuessr, you’d just click a
“send to AI” button whenever you fancied and it’d start working in the background, improving precision with each subsequent screenshot (so you could still “walk around” and pass extra
details to it).
And similarly, a little prompt manipulation could have the output include estimated GPS coordinates, allowing the code to place the pin for you while outputting its reasoning
on the side2.
The short of what I’m saying is: if you’re playing GeoGuessr against somebody you don’t trust not to cheat… they might well be cheating. And thanks to the explanatory output, they can
even justify their explanations for the places they dropped pins.
What about other photos?
The other thought that comes to my mind is: could this be used to infer approximate geolocations from photos whose EXIF metadata has been stripped. Because if so, that’s the
kind of thing that’s certain to get exploited by all kind of people who want to know where you are/were at a particular time. For example… law enforcement, stalkers, and
other unsavoury types.
Explanation: The photograph shows a large ship docked at a port with a building that displays the text “WELCOME TO PORT OF SPAIN”. This text is in English,
indicating an English-speaking country. The mention of “Port of Spain” directly specifies the port’s location in the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago. The design and style of
the port facilities, as well as the presence of a ship named “Logos Hope”, which is known to visit many ports globally, further suggests a Caribbean port, aligning with Port of
Spain’s known characteristics.
Location: The Rollright Stones, England, United Kingdom
Explanation: The photograph depicts an area with several ancient standing stones arranged in a circle in a rural setting, characteristic of a stone circle.
These are typically found in certain parts of the UK. The terrain is typical of the British countryside, with a grassy field and surrounding trees. The specific arrangement
and size of the stones, along with the style of fencing and walking paths, are reminiscent of the Rollright Stones, one of Britain’s historic sites known for a circle of
Neolithic or Bronze Age standing stones located in Oxfordshire, England.
Coordinates: 51.9743, -1.5731
✅ Again, spot on. If you’d never been to the Rollright Stones, you probably wouldn’t get that one, because while it’s a distinctive-looking stone circle… it’s not that
distinctive-looking, right? Let’s be honest: it’s some rocks in a field.
Explanation: The photograph prominently features the Galata Tower in the background, a well-known landmark in Istanbul, Turkey. Moreover, the presence of a ferry
or similar boat and the architectural style of the surrounding buildings are indicative of Istanbul’s famous skyline. The signage in Turkish, as suggested by the word partially
visible on the left, also supports this location as Turkey is a predominantly Turkish-speaking country. These elements combined make it highly likely that the photograph was taken
in Istanbul.
Coordinates: 41.0082, 28.9784
✅ The coordinates aren’t exactly right – it’s placed us in the city rather than on a boat, which we clearly are – but it’s not done badly. Spotting the Galata Tower3 was a nice move.
Location: Cardiff Bay, Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Explanation: The photograph features a marina with modern residential buildings, which is characteristic of the Cardiff Bay area in Cardiff, Wales. The
architecture, clear blue skies, and marina setting are reminiscent of Cardiff’s waterfront development. Additionally, the presence of English signage on the boat (“FINBAR”)
supports a location in an English-speaking country. Cardiff Bay is known for its redeveloped waterfront area with modern apartments and leisure facilities surrounding the marina.
The style and design of the building are consistent with developments in Cardiff’s revitalized docklands.
Coordinates: 51.4626, -3.1678
❌ Oops! Nope. I can see the thinking of what it’s claiming, there, but this was actually the Ipswich marina. I went for a walk to take a break from the code I’d been writing
and took this somewhere in the vicinity of the blue plaque for Edward Ardizzone that I’d just spotted (I was
recording a video for my kids, who’ve enjoyed several of his Tim… books).
So I don’t think this is necessarily a game-changer for Internet creeps yet. So long as you’re careful not to post photos in which you’re in front of any national monuments and
strip your EXIF metadata as normal, you’re probably not going to give away where you are quite yet.
Footnotes
1 And in a single-player game only: I didn’t actually want to cheat anybody out
of a legitimate victory!
2 I’m not going to implement GeoCheatr, as I’d probably name it. Unless somebody
feels like paying me to do so: I’m open for freelance work right now, so if you want to try to guarantee the win at the GeoGuessr World Championships (which will involve the much-riskier act of cheating in
person, so you’ll want a secret UI – I’m thinking a keyboard shortcut to send data to the AI, and an in-ear headphone so it can “talk” back to you?), look me up? (I’m mostly
kidding, of course: just because something’s technically-possible doesn’t mean it’s something I want to do, even for your money!)
4 3Camp is Three Rings‘ annual volunteer
get-together, hackathon, and meetup. People come together for an intensive week of making-things-better for charities the world over.
Made a little progress on the game idea I’d been experimenting with. The idea is to do find a series of orthogonal (like a rook in chess!)
moves that land on every square exactly once each before returning to the start, dodging walls and jumping pits.
But the squares have arrows (limiting the direction you can move out of them) or numbers (specifying the distance you must travel from them).
Every board is solvable, starting from any square. There’ll be a playable version to use on your device (with helpful features like “undo”) sometime soon, but for now you can give them
a go by hand, if you like this kind of puzzle!
In light of Trump’s attempts to axe Voice of America, because it is, he claims,
“anti-Trump” (and because he’s so insecure that he can’t stand the thought that taxpayer dollars might go to anybody who disagrees with him in any way, for any reason), I’ve produced a
suggested update to the rules of Twilight Struggle for the inevitable 9th
printing:
I guess the Russian player gets to stretch their influence unchecked, anywhere they want, from 2025 onwards.
In the game, I mean.
Yet another blow to US soft power in order to appease the ego of convicted felon Donald Trump. Sigh.
I didn’t know how to solve the puzzle, but I did know how to write a computer program to solve it for me. That would probably be even more fun, and I could argue that it didn’t
actually count as cheating. I didn’t want the solution to reveal itself to me before I’d had a chance to systematically hunt it down, so I dived across the room to turn off the
console.
I wanted to have a shower but I was worried that if I did then inspiration might strike and I might figure out the answer myself. So I ran upstairs to my office, hit my Pomodoro
timer, scrolled Twitter to warm up my brain, took a break, made a JIRA board, Slacked my wife a status update, no reply, she must be out of signal. Finally I fired up my preferred
assistive professional tool. Time to have a real vacation.
…
Obviously, I’d be a fan of playing your single-player video game any damn way you like. But beyond that, I see Robert’s point: there are some
puzzles that are just as much (or more) fun to write a program to solve than to solve as a human. Digital jigsaws would be an obvious
and ongoing example, for me, but I’ve also enjoyed “solving” Hangman (not strictly a single-player game, but
my “solution” isn’t really applicable to human opponents anyway), Mastermind (this is single-player, in my personal
opinion – fight me! – the codemaster doesn’t technically have anything “real” to do; their only purpose is to hold secret information), and I never got into Sudoku principally because I
found implementing a solver much more fun that being a solver.
Anyway: Robert’s post shows that he’s got too much time on his hands when his wife and kids are away, and it’s pretty fun.
Being on your phone all the time and while also not being on your phone all the time has never been more important.
“It is as if you were on your phone” is a phone-based experience for pretending to be on your phone without needing to be on your phone. All from the comfort of your phone.
Relax and blend in with familiar gestures and realistic human behaviour.
When I tried this fun and experimental game, I was struck by a feeling of deja vu. Was this really new? It felt ever so familiar.
Turns out, it draws a lot of inspiration from its 2016 prequel, It is as if you were playing
chess. Which I’d completely forgotten about until just now.
It really is almost as if I were on my phone.
Anyway, It is as if you were on your phone is… well, it’s certainly a faithful simulation of what it would be like to be on my phone. If you saw me, you’d genuinely think that
I was on my phone, even though in reality I was just playing It is as if you were on your phone on my phone. That’s how accurate it is.
I’ve been playing Sean O’Connor’s Slay for around 30 years (!), but somehow it took until today, on the Android version,
before I tried my hand at “rewilding” the game world.
The rules of the game make trees… a bad thing: you earn no income from hexes with them. But by the time I was winning this map anyway, I figured that encouraging growback would be a
pleasant way to finish the round.
Play your videogames any damn way you want. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s a right or wrong way to enjoy a single-player game. Today I took a strategy wargame and grew a forest. How
will you play?
Except to children, I don’t really give Christmas presents to (or expect to receive them from) others any more.
But that didn’t stop my buying myself a gift of a particularly fun Lego set to build over the festive period (with a little help from the eldest child!).
![A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.](/_q23u/2025/03/20250313_100059-640x487.jpg)
