I rebuilt La Cuatrola for YouTube Playables: one legality function for humans and bots, art and sound generated by code, six languages, and a Daily Hand the engine solves exactly. Here's what the table taught me that no rulebook could.
Godot has no way to render a 360° video you can look around in. I built one: six synchronized cameras, an equirectangular shader, FFmpeg and spherical metadata, driven from a bottom panel. Here's what broke at the cube seams and how I fixed it.
How Estragon-9B went from 38% to 83% on an engine-verified GDScript benchmark for ~$150: the dataset, the RL cycles that failed, the one that worked, and honest quant numbers.
Measured benchmarks, the KV-cache math that makes 8 GB fit, and a Windows 11 setup kit that takes an RTX 3060 Ti from blank slate to chained tool calls against a locally-hosted 9B model in one PowerShell command.
Hytale launched with barely any server documentation. I set one up, wrote six scripts to automate it, and put together a tutorial covering both Linux and Windows.
I spent a weekend building a Linux system from absolute zero — compiling every package by hand, one at a time. Here's what a game programmer learned about operating systems by doing the most tedious thing possible.