The Curious Engineer

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Fortress of Doors

fortressofdoors.com

Lars Doucet's personal blog -- Game design and stuff.

Game developmentSociety / politics / economyEssays / personalAI / ML

’15’20’25
Posts
191 from 9 Mar 2011 to 8 Aug 2025
Posting
now and then
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personal blog
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2025 14

  1. Researchers beware of ChatGPT's "Wikipedia Brain"
  2. Super Municipal Property Tax Simulator 2000
  3. We Trade with Ants: From the Notebook of Anastasia Demoupoulous
  4. We Trade With Ants: Plague
  5. GeoSpooktral Information Systems
  6. Little Petter's Friend
  7. We Trade With Ants: The Little Speakers
  8. Dark Mirror Ideologies
  9. Mass Appraisal for the Masses
  10. Announcing the Center for Land Economics
  11. Defender's Quest 2 is released
  12. Will capital-havers or capability-havers gain the most from AI?
  13. Narcolepsy is weird but I didn't notice
  14. Take the pedals off the bike

2024 7

  1. Memory Eternal, Nikolas Doucet
  2. We Trade With Ants: Picking Up The Pieces
  3. What is the maximum rate of human progress?
  4. Grief is like Pong played in reverse
  5. Operation Garbage Fountain
  6. We Trade With Ants: A Short Story Series
  7. Four Magic Words

2023 6

  1. Losing my son
  2. Ballad of St. Halvor
  3. Maximizing the chances of an Anti-AI Human Revolution
  4. Defender's Quest 2's Free Demo is Live now on Steam!
  5. Re-announcing Defender's Quest 2 (Art & Trailer Reveal!)
  6. DQ2 Progress Report for January 2023

2022 13

  1. AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off
  2. Year end retrospective-- DQ2 Progress Report for November 2022
  3. Content Push -- DQ2 Progress Report for October 2022
  4. Rebalancing -- DQ2 Progress Report for September 2022
  5. Bug Hunt -- DQ2 Progress Report for August 2022
  6. Buff Snakes -- DQ2 Progress Report for July 2022
  7. Fireworks -- DQ2 Progress Report for June 2022
  8. Tracing Lines -- DQ2 Progress Report for May 2022
  9. Finishing the Map -- DQ2 Progress Report for April 2022
  10. Building a Better Wave -- DQ2 Progress Report for March 2022
  11. Summoning Reinforcements -- DQ2 Progress Report for February 2022
  12. Sick Month -- DQ2 Progress Report for January 2022
  13. Distilling Skills -- DQ2 Progress Report for December 2021

2021 15

  1. Stoking Rivalry -- DQ2 Progress Report for November 2021
  2. Taking Hostages -- DQ2 Progress Report for October 2021
  3. Powering through -- DQ2 Progress Report for September 2021
  4. Overcoming "Level Designer's" Block: DQ2 Progress Report August 2021
  5. Degraded Blockchains
  6. Flow and Feedback -- DQ2 Progress Report for July 2021
  7. The Rule of Firsts in Game Testing
  8. So You Want To Compete With Roblox
  9. The Future of Games is an Instant Flash to the past
  10. Elements and Leeches: DQ2 progress report for May 2021
  11. Balancing Defender's Quest 2's "minion" classes
  12. Parade of Parasites: DQ2 progress report for March 2021
  13. We don't actually know when many Steam games were first released
  14. Tanking Texas Temperatures: DQ2 progress report for February 2021
  15. March of the Machines: DQ2 Progress report for Dec. 2020 / Jan. 2021

2020 13

  1. Defender's Quest 2 Progress Report for November 2020
  2. Reflecting and recharging - October 2020
  3. Collecting Details: Defender's Quest 2 Progress for September 2020
  4. GameDataCrunch: my facts-first game metrics website
  5. Defender's Quest 2 Progress for August 2020: Electric Four Square
  6. Fun vs. Balance: Defender's Quest 2 Progress for July 2020
  7. Independent once more: Defender's Quest 2 Progress for June 2020
  8. The Evolution of Game Genres: NES, Gameboy, and SNES
  9. Back in the Saddle: Defender's Quest 2 / my life progress report for May 2020
  10. Extra Quarantine: Defender's Quest 2 Progress for April 2020
  11. Balancing Quarantine: Defender's Quest 2 Progress for March 2020
  12. Laser Lightning Bugs in the Spotlight: Defender's Quest 2 Progress for February 2020
  13. Defender's Quest 2 Progress: January 2020

2019 11

  1. Defender's Quest 2 Progress: December 2019
  2. Collecting Power -- Defender's Quest 2 Progress: November 2019
  3. Defender's Quest 2 Progress: October 2019
  4. Defender's Quest 2 tester/backer build out today
  5. Steamy Bees -- Defender's Quest 2 Progress: September 2019
  6. Setting Boundaries, Open Source, & Gamedev on Consoles
  7. Defender's Quest 2 Progress: August 2019
  8. Steam Diving Bell
  9. Defender's Quest 2 Progress: February-July 2019
  10. Wash your game's windows
  11. So You Want To Compete With Steam: Epic, Discord, Kartridge, etc

2018 13

  1. Operation Tell Valve All The Things, 3.0
  2. How to scientifically survey all of Steam's developers
  3. Defender's Quest 2 alpha/beta/tester access is now available.
  4. DQ1 Physical Edition, Discord, DQ2 news
  5. It Doesn't Matter What You Do, Do Something
  6. How Porting to the PSVita improved performance everywhere else
  7. Defender's Quest DX for PSVita is released.
  8. DQII: platforms announced, DQI: Vita, Limited Run, Switch, OpenFL Console Targets
  9. Known Bugs in Defender's Quest DX console version -- patch incoming soon
  10. Defender's Quest DX is out on PS4 TODAY (XB1 tomorrow)
  11. Making videogame box art that doesn't suck. Say no to Face Bouquet!
  12. Defender's Quest coming to PlayStation and Xbox in February 2018
  13. So You Want To Compete With Steam

2017 4

  1. How the Sausage gets made (aka "where the @$%^ is DQII")
  2. Stores vs. Developers vs. Customers vs. Publishers
  3. Player-Friendly Atomic Game Modding
  4. Steam Discovery 2.0, Stegosaurus Tail 2.0

2016 7

  1. December's Quest
  2. Oil it or Spoil it!
  3. How We Paid Our Open Source Taxes
  4. G2a, Piracy, and the Four Currencies
  5. Bounds, Bottlenecks, and Digital Marketing
  6. Defender's Quest Deluxe Launches Today
  7. Supporting a single-player Indie RPG for Four Years

2015 13

  1. Doing an HD Remake the Right Way: FFVI Edition
  2. Defender's Quest HD Demo, initial public test
  3. Defender's Quest II: Uematsu Music, Battle Art, Story!
  4. Doing an HD Remake the Right Way
  5. Ad Blockers and the Four Currencies
  6. Defender's Quest
  7. Haxe/OpenFL for home Game Consoles
  8. Mods, Salutary Neglect, and Storks
  9. Automated Transparent Development
  10. Defender's Quest 2 - Weaselmancer and cast preview
  11. DQ1HD and DQ2 Milestone Plan
  12. Stenography for Programming
  13. Game Maker, Security, and Freedom

2014 15

  1. I Wish Upon a Steam
  2. Steam Traffic Patterns Deep Dive
  3. Why are we releasing DQ1HD as a free upgrade?
  4. Brave NewSteam World
  5. Follow Your Dreams!...Or Maybe Don't.
  6. Automatic Progress Tracking
  7. Will that crowdfunded game ever actually ship?
  8. Dear Adobe: Support Haxe, save your Tools
  9. Doubling Down on Community
  10. Defender's Quest 2 Engine progress - resolution!
  11. An Algorithm for Discovering "Hidden Gems"
  12. Nobuo Uematsu to work on Defender's Quest 2
  13. Defender's Quest 2 March Update
  14. Flash is dead, long live OpenFL!
  15. Playing Defender's Quest with the Steam Controller

2013 5

  1. The Stegosaurus Tail: when "The Long Tail" grows spikes.
  2. On Procedural Death Labyrinths
  3. Defender's Quest II's "UnKickstarter" approach to crowdfunding
  4. Story-telling as Problem Solving: Defender's Quest (GDC 2013 Narrative Summit)
  5. Steam Linux Sale : Results

2012 20

  1. Tourette Quest - Media, Magic, and Nostrils!
  2. Free 2 Play and the Four Currencies
  3. Tourette's Quest
  4. Steam Launch Date: October 30th
  5. Defender's Quest GOLD launches on Kongregate
  6. Defender's Quest GOLD launch
  7. Defender's Quest gold launches today
  8. Defender's Quest coming to Steam!
  9. Freeloadable content - an alternative to paid DLC
  10. The Holy Grail of Digital Distribution
  11. Defender's Quest: By the Numbers
  12. Pay What You Want and the Four Currencies
  13. Details on upcoming GOLD version
  14. Piracy and the four currencies, part 2
  15. Piracy and the four currencies
  16. Version 0.8.9 is ready!
  17. Forum and Wiki are live!
  18. New patch 0.8.4 coming today!
  19. Defender's Quest Deployment Strategy
  20. Defender's Quest is RELEASED

2011 9

  1. Nearing Release
  2. A Status Effect Stacking Algorithm
  3. Lessons in Demo Launching
  4. Designing an Anti-Incest Algorithm
  5. RPG's, challenge, and grinding.
  6. RPG's and Suckage
  7. Upgrades, Equipment, and Skill Trees
  8. Don't mess with RPG's
  9. Rebooting the RPG

Undated 26

  1. Was localizing defenders quest worth it
  2. The quest to upscale pixel art
  3. Optimizing tower defense for focus and thinking defenders quest
  4. Fixing steams user rating charts
  5. Dq2 update and announcing dq1hd
  6. Wholetsplay 2014 plans
  7. Wholetsplay getting started
  8. Youtube and the new audiovisual literacy
  9. Indie solidarity telepath tactics
  10. Indie rpgs on sale today
  11. Quick news
  12. Password wtf
  13. News facebook and google pages
  14. News calling for testers
  15. New art style
  16. News
  17. Practical game design the rule of threes
  18. Update
  19. Super energy metropolis prototype 3 results
  20. Super energy metropolis prototype 3
  21. Super energy metropolis prototype 2 results
  22. Super energy metropolis prototype 2
  23. Super energy metropolis prototype 1 results
  24. Super energy metropolis prototype 1
  25. Design 101 first principles
  26. Super energy apocalypse post mortem