??? stay tuned... 🛠️ Former Creative Tools Designer for @FNCreate @EpicGames
Eugene, OR
Joined April 2010
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Day 8 of UI/UX Skills
Learned a lot by adding this frame. Lots of little lighting and shaping tricks. I started to freehand without the tutorial near the end to start creating the effect I wanted. Really starting to feel the understanding. 😊😊😊
Open for Verse/UI work
RayBenefield retweeted
"I don't review code anymore"
Honestly, I'll never understand this.
I just had to prompt Opus 5.5 more than it was necessary to simply convert a dialog to a popover.
It left a lot of dead code and added unnecessary complications. I had to read the code multiple times and point out the issues.
Don't tell me it's my skill issue for such a banal change.
RayBenefield retweeted
AI is going to create millions of new game creators. So @BrendanStock @gubmanic @mbleyleben and I have been cooking up something to help them succeed
RayBenefield retweeted
i've had to go through an odd reckoning. i've always believed in meritocracy, but i tell students who ask for advice that in today's market, there's a point where the product and the developers stop mattering. it breaks my brain, because i want GOOD work to win so badly.
RayBenefield retweeted
Educators! Developers! Artists! Check out this great opportunity to participate in the #UEFN professional bootcamp!!
Last week, we announced our free UEFN Professional Bootcamp, to help prepare developers on the road to the bringing together of UE and UEFN in Unreal Engine 6
Don't miss your chance to apply!: epic.gm/uefn-professional-bo…
🌞🌞🌞 Week 2 of Claude Code
It's been a wild week, and my AI sentiment is growing. It's a powerful, but dangerous tool. But like a knife can be used for bad or good. Gen AI IS bad, mainly because it allows bad capitalistic actors that don't care about other humans to keep them out of the process rather than making space for them to thrive.
However in the hands of the right people, it is absolutely an accelerant. I'm an automation engineer with HIGH standards for good automation. So finding the right way to train AI and the right things to add/remove from the workflow is crucial to being good at it.
Quickly realizing that several harnesses/success gates aren't as necessary as I thought. So if you aren't cleaning up things regularly and rethinking your workflow, you are wasting valuable time/tokens. Your ROI on AI starts to drop. I did hit max usage on my $100 plan for Fable, and 84% for all other models.
My primary goal was teaching it everything I've been doing for the last 3 years. I needed it to understand the timeline and the goals. Both for our own record and also for its own understanding of WHY the code is very different.
Took me about 3 days to fully go through with it. And after that the rest was really, how do I get it introduced to what we are doing on a small scale. So since the end of the first week was creating a good art pipeline that supports human artists, I decided to have that art pipeline output interact with the framework. And this morning was the final test of something with basic art functionally fully working landed and meeting the standards of the framework enough to work with it.
Now every widget's art comes from that art pipeline, and the `Close` button at the bottom of the screen was also created as its own component for the framework and works exactly as I need it to. Close the UI. Well act as an action button really.
So this was the first slice of getting AI into our own company's work. And I feel really good about what's about to start happening with our own product. The basic art styles of all the widgets now come from our art pipeline, the widget scaffolds to work with the framework are now built via AI. And that close button is all of it working together for new functionality.
This next week is getting my second brain online and then teaching AI to do a larger part of the framework to add more substantial features. I'm stoked for the future ahead.
RayBenefield retweeted
We’ve got a lot of things cooking in the background and are not going anywhere anytime soon. If you’ve got exceptional talent, whether a creator, engineer, live ops team, or just building something powerful in the UGC space: we want to work with you. Contact us today.
We started Chartis with one simple question: “How do we help UEFN creators become successful.”
We’ve had quite the past 3 years, working closely with creators big and small, from @BirdoBro and @dagwummy -shoutout GDC 2024- to @FeRinS_FN @HazeCoding @TeraCreators , @ChitaZ , @ManuA12, and @jaythofficial just to name a few of the 150+ creators I get to spend every day with.
But the stakes have changed. AI is opening up exponential possibilities for creators on Fortnite and Roblox, but also new entrants like Google Playground, Spawn, and Astrocade.
We’ve bootstrapped Chartis for close to three years, and now the opportunity to help hundreds of thousands of new creators be more successful means we need to scale and accelerate.
We’re taking investment from @MrDylanCollins , Maximilian Bleyleben, and their Attention Holdings vehicle to 1000x what we’re already doing.
Dylan is well known in the UGC space (he’s founded multiple successful companies including SuperAwesome, which Epic Games acquired) and Max has scaled multiple companies (including SuperAwesome as co-founder & COO).
More importantly, they are joining us full time, bringing immense firepower to our already incredible team.
This is the evolution of Chartis, going from bootstrapping to accelerating - (still fueled by Yerba, beers, and vibes)
We’re focused on launching more services and initiatives for UGC creators on Fortnite to help them become wildly successful. But we’re not stopping there. AI has clearly opened up the gates to people who like games but could never (until now) become game creators.
The future’s wild and we’re just getting started. LFG
Hugs congrats to the @chartisgames team and everyone in their network. I've watched these folks push hard on the ecosystem trying different things to find a thing that works.
They've found their success and more and it's awesome that they are helping so many 💖💖💖
We started Chartis with one simple question: “How do we help UEFN creators become successful.”
We’ve had quite the past 3 years, working closely with creators big and small, from @BirdoBro and @dagwummy -shoutout GDC 2024- to @FeRinS_FN @HazeCoding @TeraCreators , @ChitaZ , @ManuA12, and @jaythofficial just to name a few of the 150+ creators I get to spend every day with.
But the stakes have changed. AI is opening up exponential possibilities for creators on Fortnite and Roblox, but also new entrants like Google Playground, Spawn, and Astrocade.
We’ve bootstrapped Chartis for close to three years, and now the opportunity to help hundreds of thousands of new creators be more successful means we need to scale and accelerate.
We’re taking investment from @MrDylanCollins , Maximilian Bleyleben, and their Attention Holdings vehicle to 1000x what we’re already doing.
Dylan is well known in the UGC space (he’s founded multiple successful companies including SuperAwesome, which Epic Games acquired) and Max has scaled multiple companies (including SuperAwesome as co-founder & COO).
More importantly, they are joining us full time, bringing immense firepower to our already incredible team.
This is the evolution of Chartis, going from bootstrapping to accelerating - (still fueled by Yerba, beers, and vibes)
We’re focused on launching more services and initiatives for UGC creators on Fortnite to help them become wildly successful. But we’re not stopping there. AI has clearly opened up the gates to people who like games but could never (until now) become game creators.
The future’s wild and we’re just getting started. LFG
Put in your pitches for who you want to see on the Creative Juice podcast now folks!!! ❤️🔥❤️🔥
❤️🔥
@ImmatureGamer is doing amazing work 😊😊😊
RayBenefield retweeted
Epic’s entire business model is “we do well when you do well.” This is why criticism directed at Tim & Epic angers me. A lot.
Unreal Engine is what got me into game deving years ago. It opened the door to a world I always dreamed of being part of since I was a kid. Without people like @TimSweeneyEpic making tools like this freely accessible, many devs like me might never have taken that first step. Let's not forget Unity's pricing controversy a few years ago, which left devs questioning their trust in the company and considering alternatives like Unreal.
Tim has helped build something that allows countless people to turn their ideas into actual games. That's why you should respect his vision, even if you don't agree with him on everything. I understand that some artists fear what AI could mean for their livelihoods but disagreeing with his views on AI doesn't erase what he has built or contributed to game development. You can challenge his opinion without pretending the man knows nothing about creating.
RayBenefield retweeted
Epic's Unreal Engine, running in a browser tab.
Not a video. Not a stream. Your own graphics card.
Nanite, Lumen, multiplayer servers in WebAssembly, and gameplay in TypeScript.
#UnrealEngine #WebGPU
Prompt for you agent 👇
RayBenefield retweeted
Fun fact,
@TimSweeneyEpic first noted the ideas and principles that Verse traces back to in 1999.
Then in 2006 he presented the core concepts at the Principles of Programming Languages conference in the paper "The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer's Perspective".
Finally in 2019 a team was finally assembled at Epic to build it into what Verse is today.
Tim Sweeney
-> Self-taught programmer
-> Designed three programming languages
-> Wrote UnrealScript’s compiler and VM himself
-> Building his latest, Verse, with the creator of Haskell and the co-creator of Scheme
@TimSweeneyEpic is a pretty cracked programmer if you ask me.
RayBenefield retweeted
We’re incredibly excited to share that Hawthorn is an #EpicMegaGrants recipient!
This is a huge help for our small, independent team, and will support what we’re building with #UnrealEngine 5. Thank you for supporting us as we bring the world of Hawthorn to life! #IndieGameDevs
RayBenefield retweeted
I'll keep saying this but if you have to do UI work this is the best resource, so much inspiration!
Can't believe how close we're getting to the 2000 games mark... it only took six years! 😁
gameuidatabase.com
😔😔😔 Sad face... this is TOO much like @BroccoliGames Coffee Caravan. Like use the power of AI to be creative at least.
You have the power of a genie at your fingertips folks. Use that extra time you gain to do research and experiment. It's a beautiful time to be an indie.
It's a beautiful age for those of us who have subscribed to Reductionism as a philosophy. EVERYTHING is kung fu. 😉😉😉
RayBenefield retweeted
It’s a shockingly smaller relevant state space than we previously thought. For example, the fact that we can have a high quality generative image model in the same space as 1000 photos says there is far more regularity than anyone imagined.
