I wrote this from reverse engineering the original Windows executables while building Atlantis Native, an open-source reimplementation of the engine (https://github.com/ripleyXLR8/atlantis-native). It covers how Cryo stored the 360° panoramas inside their HNM6 video format, how the engine projects them on screen, the CON scripting language that drives the whole game, and how the 3D faces are rendered and lip-synced in real time. Happy to answer questions!

In The Interview, you sit across from a woman at a security interview. You can type your own questions or speak them, then decide whether to clear her or detain her. I wanted that conversation to be a game you could reason about, even though a small local language model generates the replies.

The starting point is a case file with eight entries. It gives the player concrete claims to investigate, rather than asking them to judge whether an answer merely sounds suspicious. The interview also has a finite budget of 18 questions. Those two constraints make a free-form conversation manageable: there is something to check, and a cost to asking everything. The player still chooses the wording and order.

I kept those rules in the game code. The language model supplies a reply; it does not get to redefine the number of questions or turn its own text into a verdict. The final clearance decision is a player action. This boundary matters because a convincing sentence from the model is not evidence that a game rule has changed. It also means a failed generation can be handled as a technical failure: the question is refunded rather than silently consuming one of the player's chances.

The second resource is the interviewee's composure. An ordinary question, pressing her, and accusing her have different costs. In the current game, asking restores 6 points, pressing costs 18, and accusing costs 22. Repeated questions and long silences can also hurt composure; push it too low and she stops cooperating. These are explicit rules, not a second model judging whether the player was sufficiently rude. The result is a choice between gathering another detail and applying pressure. Pausing the game stops the silence clock, so opening a menu is not part of that choice.

For the local voice pipeline, speech recognition produces the player's question, the dialogue model produces text, and speech synthesis turns the reply into audio. Text input skips recognition. I use Whisper, Qwen3 and Qwen3-TTS. Generation takes time, especially before the first sound, and a small model can get a fact wrong or leave its role. Those limitations affect this kind of game directly: a factual mistake can look like a deliberate lie, while a pause can look like an unresponsive game. They need to be treated as part of the interaction rather than hidden behind the word AI.

The released Windows version now has interface, case text, dialogue and voice in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. It runs locally after the initial model downloads. I build the underlying Unity tools as my paid Offline AI NPC plugin, but this game is free and does not require buying it.

If you want to try the resulting interrogation: https://merrymaker14.itch.io/the-interview?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=interview_110&utm_content=themakingofgames

I'm making March Out!, and one of the things I've been adjusting is how the guns communicate a shot. A cannon can have a perfectly functional projectile and still feel weak if the visible feedback is over almost as soon as it starts. The musket line had a related problem: each shot needed a brief flash, but repeated firing needed to leave smoke behind.

I split the musket effect into a short muzzle flame, a fresh powder puff and a slower cloud. The flame disappears quickly. The puff travels out from the barrel, while the remaining smoke expands, rises and fades over several seconds. A firing line can therefore have a new shot visible inside the cloud left by earlier shots.

The important implementation detail is that those particles use world space positions and velocities. The emitters are reused, but an old cloud stays where that gun fired. It doesn't follow a moving soldier or jump across the battlefield when the same pooled emitter handles another muzzle. Particle caps bound how much each emitter retains. That's a tradeoff, not a claim that smoke is free at any army size.

The cannon uses the same separation at a larger scale: a brief bright bloom, an orange flame, a directional pressure jet, sparks and a longer powder cloud. The cannon's hanging smoke lasts roughly five to seven seconds in the current effect. I can adjust that persistence without stretching the flash into a glowing ball that follows the barrel.

The sound is triggered at the actual shot release. Gun reports have pitch variation, and cannon reports use dedicated audio voices so ordinary combat clashes don't immediately steal them. Contact has its own sound and effect: a short flash, dust, smoke and debris at the impact position. The cannon impact fan is visual feedback; the ordinary cannon still resolves a direct hit rather than that whole visible fan becoming a new damage radius.

The two supporting clips are staged in the developer sandbox with original game audio. They show the native cannon discharge and repeated arquebus firing. The aim is to make firing, travel and impact read as separate moments while leaving enough lingering smoke to connect one shot to the next.

Cannon clip: https://youtube.com/shorts/kV865enGyEU

Arquebus clip: https://youtube.com/shorts/PkyQHMkAY0w

So I'm a contributor of the FF7 decomp project and made a video about it and also go into some of the details on how the game runs on the PlayStation. This is largely to recover the source code that Square lost in the late 1990s. There is already a good deal of code to peek at if you want to see how things worked under the hood.
Here's the video

https://youtu.be/Fnzm0e2HepY?si=H71YngbVr-9M8-Lc

I’ve been working on an interview series focused on the people and technology behind games, and I recently got the chance to speak with Eric Arnold about his work on Red Faction: Guerrilla.

We dug into how the destruction system was built, the role of physics, some of the technical challenges behind making structures collapse convincingly, and what development at Volition looked like while they were trying to make all of it work.

Figured this might be a good fit for this subreddit:
https://youtu.be/mpNiNUuMs7k?is=mN2YCpeek6bZ8HyM

Would also be curious to hear what other games you think are especially interesting from a technical or development-history perspective.

Hi there,

We are in our final days of Kickstarter for Region Locked: Unlocking Australian Video Games.

This documentary series is all about the making of Australian video games, the building and formation of the Aussie game industry and the rollercoaster moments that took us from development powerhouses to indie focused mini-hubs.

If you're interested in games such as The Hobbit, Way of the Exploding Fist, KKND, Transformers (PS2), LA Noire, Bioshock/2, Destroy all Humans, And many more - follow along and pledge soon!

4 days remain.