Which is of course the same thing, but what it means is that rather than using my own name, I'll be releasing Foolish Earth Creatures and my future games under the label Space Goblin Games.

Space Goblin Games has a website, www.spacegoblingames.com, and I'm in the process of updating sites with my games to use it rather than (or in addition to) my real name. Notably, this means the URL for my games on itch.io is now spacegoblingames.itch.io rather than johnayliff.itch.io. Links with the old URL should redirect to the new one.

Why use a games studio name? My hope is that it will make me look more professional and make my games look more serious (and therefore more worth paying for). It also means that I can commission artwork and music for my games without feeling like I'm taking credit for others' work by putting “by John Ayliff” on the entire game.

Why “Space Goblin Games”? I've always liked goblins in fantasy fiction—small, ugly-cute, mischievous but probably not really evil. In D&D and games of that tradition they're a very weak enemy, and I'm drawn to them in a rooting-for-the-underdogs kind of way. Meanwhile, of course, I'm a space nerd and most of my games are about space. So a space goblin felt like the perfect game dev persona.

To be clear, Space Goblin Games is still just me; I have no plans for it to ever be a company with employees besides myself.

#meta #SpaceGoblinGames

• I've imported my email subscriber list from the old Wordpress blog to this one. If you don't want to be subscribed, there should be an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email.
• If you're receiving this post as an email, that means that the temporary problem that was stopping emails from being sent is now fixed.
• In case you missed it, the other day I posted the first dev blog about my new WIP.
• I've also made a channel for discussion of the new game on my Discord server.

That's all for now. I'll try to get back on a monthly schedule for dev blogs about the new game.

#meta

I'm moving my blog yet again, from https://johnayliff.wordpress.com/ to https://write.as/johnayliff/ .

When I stopped using Patreon last year (because its payment model no longer worked for me), I moved my developer diaries to a Wordpress site, because I already had a Wordpress site that had been lying dormant for years and it was easier to dust that off than to investigate new platforms.

But I've increasingly noticed 'AI Assistant' buttons appearing in the Wordpress interface, pushing me to create text and images using generative AI. I've got to assume that this also means it's scraping all the text and images I post to feed some GenAI model.

Generative AI is environmentally devastating, using vast amounts of power and water at a time when we as a civilization need to urgently decrease our energy use. It's also built on plagiarism, is being used by businesses to put creative people out of work, and its output is fundamentally soulless and artistically bankrupt. I don't believe there are any ethical uses for generative AI.

I can't in good conscience continue to use Wordpress, so I'll be moving my future dev diaries and other blog posts to this write.as blog.

As far as I can tell there's no way to bulk import posts from Wordpress into Write.as (write.as can import posts, but not in the format Wordpress exports), so I'm leaving my Wordpress site up for the moment as an archive. I might migrate some of the more important old posts over manually at some point.

#meta