Rotating Rooms 🎮, Jonathan Blow Engine 👨💻, Avalanche Hiring 🧙
🎮 Game Dev Deep Dives
Inside Detective Fantasia: Dev Shares Mind-Bending Rotating Room Tutorial
Solo dev Teo Chhim has shared a new tutorial from his Game Boy-inspired open-world murder mystery, Detective Fantasia: EXCALIMURDER. This breakdown focuses on a surprisingly complex rotating room with a staircase that may take multiple passes to fully understand. It follows an earlier tutorial on building the game’s ocean level, hinting at a growing library of technical deep dives. The post also nudges readers to follow the dev and wishlist the game to track its progress.
Inside Jonathan Blow’s New Game, Custom Engine, and ‘Two‑Second’ Compiler
Jonathan Blow unpacks the design of Order of the Sinking Star, where four fully realized games eventually fuse into a larger, rule‑rich whole. He traces Braid’s rewind mechanic back to early mailing‑list debates and emulator savestates, then explains why C++’s bloat and slow builds drove him to create the Jai language and a custom engine that compiles ~300k lines in about two seconds. Along the way he shares blunt advice on long indie projects, tool design, and how the web’s architecture went sideways.
📈 Business & Monetisation Insights
From Black Box to Blueprint: Building a Healthy Mobile Ad Stack
Olga Zharuk from Teqblaze explains why many mobile publishers are “optimising blind” inside black-box ad stacks controlled by external systems. She exposes the hidden costs of piling on ad partners—SDK maintenance, slow investigations, and game stability risks—and makes the case for one central management layer plus a focused set of strong buyers. With a white-label SSP, studios can define auction logic, control player-facing ad behaviour, and still attract premium demand. It’s a practical roadmap to stronger ad revenue without sacrificing user experience.
🧙♂️ Big IP & Industry Rumblings
Avalanche Hiring Multiplayer Engineer, Fueling Hogwarts Legacy Sequel Rumors
Avalanche, the studio behind Hogwarts Legacy, is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build backend infrastructure for an “online multiplayer RPG.” That phrasing has fans speculating that a Hogwarts Legacy sequel could finally introduce multiplayer to the wizarding world. While the listing may simply use the hit game as branding, it clearly signals Avalanche’s push into online RPG tech. For players, this could be the first hint of co-op magic on the horizon.