Brendan Caldwell - Jank (Page 2)

29 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

I love the command line

Open article.txt

I love typing weird words in the dark. The command line interface is an archaic curiosity to some, or a desperate measure - an obsidian prompt invoked by troubleshooting articles when something on your PC has gone terribly wrong. But for me it's an invitation to an invisible realm of circuitry and verbs. I thank the cybergods that plenty of game developers have a similar fascination.

For example, Duskers 2.0 was announced during the summer games dump, a long overdue sequel where the simple typing of instructions to glitching robots is the only weapon you have against an alien bestiary of unseen threats. The command line, when done well, is enough to hang a whole sci-fi horror universe upon. It's like groping around in a dark room, with language as your only limb.

"The command line allowed us to make Duskers so much more atmospheric," says Tim Keenan, founder of Misfits Attic. "It forced the player to 'speak' to the drones in their language, reinforcing the idea that you are alone and the drones you're talking to are cold tech that require you to conform your speech and thoughts to their way of communicating.

26 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell News

Quake is 30 and the mappers have gone mad

Mapmaker, mapmaker make me a map

Quake is timeless. But also, technically, it is 30 years old. This eldritch ur-game is the beast rumbling beneath the skin of every first-person shooter you have ever played, and if you know what's good for you, you will sacrifice a small farm animal in honour of its anniversary this week, or maybe just an avocado. I don't want to get you in trouble.

Nobody is making a greater fuss over the birthday of the first proper 3D shooter than its diehard mappers. Even in a normal month, you'd see a steady flow of new singleplayer maps frothing to the surface, thanks to the game's immortal modding and mapping scene. Maybe a collaborative jam would plonk 10-20 maps in your lap at once. But this month is wild. Since the "Q30" festival of mapmaking began, there have been over 100 new levels. And the absolute monsters of mappery are not even finished. Here's a handy roundup of what has come out so far.

Quake 30th Anniversary 1024 jam

Every jam has a theme or a gimmick to challenge the mapmongers. In this case they had to create a map that would fit

24 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Blueprints is dead, and so is my unfinished game about cats

Goodbye to the only way I know to code

Coding is hard. Show me lines of C# and I will curl into a ball and weep. I have tried many times to learn a programming language and every time I only get as far as learning about arrays before my entire neocortex dribbles out of my nose like a rejected milkshake. But that was not the case with Blueprints. Unreal Engine's visual scripting noodles let you sorta-code entire game systems using dinky little wires and pleasing flow charts. Finally, I can make the game I have always dreamt of: a broken walking sim about collecting bodega cats that will get two downloads on Itch.io.

Except now all my grand dreams are being swept away. Unreal Engine is retiring the relatively accessible Blueprints in favour of a bizarre, vaguely culty coding language called "Verse" that Epic is calling a "system for building metaverse experiences." Still going on about the metaverse, I see. Fantastic.

To understand the minor upheaval that is going on in the world of Unreal developers, you need only hear about the most recent State Of Unreal address, in which the company showed off plans for Unreal Engine 6. The decisions announced in this

19 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

I have crashed a plane into Google HQ, oh well

What a terrible accident

Google have released a flight sim. Or, to be more accurate, they've made an experimental Google Earth-based flight sim into a toy you can play in a web browser. The view is taken over with the glowing green lines of a classic flight HUD. You control pitch and yaw with arrow keys (but it works better with your mouse) and heave your thrust up 'n' down with the PageUp and PageDown keys. It is as if you are flying a plane. Wow.

You can visit incredible places in Google's sky bus, such as Mountain View, California. A beautiful municipality, home to many large technology corpor– hang on, something is... oh no, would you look at that. We're losing altitude, the Aerogoog is plummeting. Mayday? I think we say mayday. We're on a collision course with – oh my, what are the chances – somebody should do something, oh heavens, what terrible luck.

The tumbling of my virtual airtube into the headquarters of the world's biggest magic phonebook may cause some alarm among sensitive readers. Please, do not be afraid. Crashing planes in flight simulators is one of the simplest and most ancient joys of PC gaming.

18 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Living In Sim

The Data Center is where dreams go to die

Join my professional network on 192.168.0.1/24

I suppose it's time to reconcile my love for engineering marvels with the world's collective nosedive into technofeudalist hell. Okay. I can do that. Just as I find fighter jets impossibly cool, but do not actually want them used to explode people, I think data centres are impressive, but I do not like to see them sucking the world dry like a parasitic force beyond any ordinary human citizen's control. And since I am broken in the brain, the only way I know how to settle conflicting emotions like this is to play a videogame.

Data Center (US spelling) is about being a technician in charge of a data centre (UK spelling) and making sure all the wires go into the correct holes. On arrival to this new virtual workplace I find a radio on a nearby desk. I turn the radio on. It plays a sound I shall not classify as music. I turn the radio off. Time to get to work in a very compelling sort of hell.

Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.

This is an early access job sim all about

11 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Let us discover a new world

With insight from the developers of Mina The Hollower, Spelunky 2, Citizen Sleeper, and Tales From Off-Peak City

I have discovered a crab that cuts off its own eyes. It was a small moment in the warm waters of Subnautica 2, but it reminded me why I loved the first game so much. This crab has regenerating eyestalks that mimic the anemones of the seabed. "If the stalks grow too long," says a lore blurb about the critter, "the clowncrab will trim them to avoid drawing attention." Every animal has a note like this, earned when you scan them - a growing encyclopedia the player is encouraged to build to help discover the world around them.

In a fluffy way, every game is about discovery - you are finding out the rules of a world as you go along. In a non-fluffy way, some games are shit at this, and others are masterful. Inspired by a single crab, I've spoken to a handful of devs on this topic. How do the makers of Spelunky, Mina The Hollower, Citizen Sleeper, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand make sure their worlds are worth discovering? And do I reckon Subnautica 2 has hit the mark?

"The best thing a game can do to create a

08 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

It costs £7 to boot orcs off a cliff

It's all kicking off

Fatekeeper is deeply unfinished. Ladders warp you from the bottom to the top, menu items are plastered with "WIP", and there's an NPC smithy who hammers on steel without emitting a single "klang" sound effect. There is an big lizard with a saddle, but you cannot ride it (it says "Press E to Pet" the megalizard but there's no petting animation). In so many ways, this sword-swinging first-person RPG is a perfect example of eurojank released in a state of panic. I cannot honestly recommend it, notwithstanding the following counterpoints:

It has a kick button; it is seven pounds.

Well, nine pounds if the launch deal has run out by the time you've read this. This is basically Dark Messiah of Might and Magic dragged kicking and screaming and on fire into the light of 2026. It is made by a small team that have somehow maintained a blockbuster studio's backbreaking passion for placing thousands of tiny, hyperrealistic pebbles. I am not joking, it is obsessed with perfectly rendering tiny rocks. Also, you have a talking rat as a best friend.

It is not a polished game, except in the way that

03 Jun 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Character Select

Thumper beetle vs SkiFree Yeti

Let endless battle persevere

Welcome to season one of Character Select. How many seasons will there be? Only one person knows the answer, and he is on paternity leave.

This week's hyperfictional showdown is as much thought experiment as battle for survival. Step this way, unstoppable force, let me introduce you to my good friend, immovable object. It's the Beetle from Thumper versus the Yeti from SkiFree. One of them will never stop hunting you and always kills its quarry. The other is a rhythmically violent intradimensional insect capable of passing through realms of consciousness at the speed of thought. This is the Large Hadron Collider of "who'd win" scenarios. The laws of physics hang in the balance. It's now or it is never now. Select your character!

The case for the Beetle from Thumper

Have you seen somebody perform a perfect run in Thumper? It is like watching a migraine achieve sentience and launch into space. There is no species on this planet that can compete with this... thing. I briefly thought about putting Sonic the Hedgehog into this fight against the Yeti, but the blue bozo is always stopping to refuel on chilli dogs or talk to a