Without further ado, here are some random things I’ve recently come across: a new game mode in Clash Royale, 1-bit LLMs, and some game making:

  • Clash Royale, a mobile game I recently wrote about, came up with an entirely new game mode called Merge Tactics. It’s an auto battler where you play a few rounds with your familiar characters, but once the game starts, you cannot affect the outcome. Between the games you use elixir to acquire new characters and place them on the grid. Similar characters have synergy bonuses. Check out for example this video for further info!
  • LLMs such as ChatGPT are all the rage, but the models are huge and training them takes a lot of time, energy, and money. I came across this video about 1-bit LLMs that are very promising. The one bit refers to the model’s weights, which are often 8 or 16 bits, but research seems to show that equal results can be produced with a much simpler model as well. Technically a “1.58-bit” model is even more accurate, as then the weights can have a zero value in addition to plus and minus one, but see the video for yourself. 🙂
  • Finally, this game called Vuntra City has several interesting making-of videos by the dev, Lara. I found this video about simulating one million unique and persistent NPCs in the city fascinating. A million non-playable characters is a lot, but she came up with this trick of storing their basic data into a bitmap, and suddenly an image with a million pixels is not that big of a piece of data after all. Honestly, more games should let you peek behind the curtain like this.