Shediac, New Brunswick is wild y'all. (I know, wrong colour.)

I don't like drawing horses... but I think I'm OK with these. Gotta mess with scale a bit to fit 'em into the 128x128 box. (I feel like there are people who are really into horses who can knock this stuff out off-the-dome. I am not one of those people.)

God, I'm taken aback. I've had many positive interactions with him in a weird corner of the online indie game space for, jeez, I think for almost 15 years? I'd never really reflected on what a constant he was, just out there being a low-key good guy for so long. We're all poorer for his loss.

I released an update to my icon pack "Food, Spices, & Drinks"! Added 12 icons people requested in the comments over the past year or so. dgbaumgart.itch.io/icons-food-s...

Okay, hear me out. If the great design pitfall of Master of Orion 2 was being too much like a Civilization game - individual buildings/ships thus micromanagement bloat - what if we could have a Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri that was built on the design philosophy of Master of Orion 1 instead?

[10 and a half hours of driving later] Quebec? Folks, it's too big. We need Petit Quebec. Maybe just take out Trois Rivieres and half of the Gulf of St. Laurent, it'll be fine *ducking thrown bagels* what, I'm right

<3 (The HoMM call-out is particularly interesting. Never thought of that before.)

Also hey, my friend Sean is looking for work! He's a 3D environmental artist, and we worked together back in the day at Gaslamp Games. www.artstation.com/merrigore

testing new Starsector content at the minimum supported screen resolution

“I mean, your society’s broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let’s blame the people with no power & no money & these immigrants who don’t even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault.” —Iain Banks www.theguardian.com/books/2013/j...

Goblin Friday! I'm amazed at how quickly this came together. Was feeling stressed & bummed about lots of other stuff (largely water leak in house related), but - dang! It works! 'Course it needs a bunch more Maths and tooltips and data save/load. Nonetheless, wow! (Godot is nice, also, btw.)

Cannot recommend enough the @bretdevereaux.bsky.social series on what Sparta was actually like, deep and accessible dive into a monstrous society that built an outsized reputation on a fragile system of pure cruelty and ho-hum but ultimately fleeting military success acoup.blog/2019/08/16/c...

[old man voice] I miss the days when MTG art wasn't art-directed with an iron fist, it was whatever weird crap the artist cooked up so you got this weird, inconsistent gallery. And the themes were shared myths, fantasy, and probably someone's D&D game (if we're being honest) rather than The IPs.

Goblin Friday! (Last week was off for camping.) (And this week, mostly stressing out about another leak coming through the ceiling, but-) Putting together the framework for a slot-based inventory system. I love these; always have, and always will. Pictured: Kreeee wielding a coconut on his head.

*chanting* Anti-canon, anti-canon!

What if: at the end of summer every year water didn't come through my dining room ceiling? No. Such a world is impossible. I should not hope for better things. (TBH it's less upsetting the 3rd time around. I'm just like *sigh* guess we're doing this again. And the leak looks small anyway.)

Stock Starsector dialogs: - Harangue a planetary administrator into giving classified information - Buy a round for the space-bar - Someone standing next to you is shot due to convoluted political machinations - Use story point to convince someone that you are the literal devil. Somehow this helps.

New Starsector blog post: Officer Flexibility fractalsoftworks.com/2025/08/18/o... Talking about some changes that make officers easier to work with, as well as some changes to s-mods, and a quick update about the plan for the next release!

Goblin Friday! Coming back after a week off (camping!) Fresh perspective: wrote some documentation & specs for features I've been putting off (inventory/items + "human alarm"). Feedback makes me want to get all the mechanics in working together, however placeholdery. So I'm working on that a bit!

Dear HVAC installer from like 8 years ago who lackadaisically jammed a piece of insulating tape into the AC drainage pipe, blocking ~80% of the flow: you messed up! (Ahem. Feeling handy right now, but looks like it'd be a good idea to replace this stupid unit prettttty soon due to water damage.)

All this: colton.dev/blog/curing-... -- but for art. It's easy to generate an image that _looks_ like it's full of value and effort. But you lose in the coherence of details and concept, you lose if it's not based on common tropes, you lose trying to fit it into a coherent work or asset pipeline.

Goblin Friday! A couple days ago I sent a couple builds to a couple people for feedback. Doing this made me realize how inadequate the basic "infrastructure" is - quit, menu state, pause/continue, turn state transitions. So I'm doing a pass through those. Maybe even save/load, if we're lucky?

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

I wrote so much very specific-feeling dialog for a minor character that I felt like I might as well make them a unique person - then realized I had a stray character half-developed (portrait even!) for a very unimplemented narrative arc that fits perfectly into the role. ... Perfect! #starsector

Goblin Friday! Missed a couple due to travel. Back to Goblin Mode! Goal: get a build playable again to send to people I met and promised could play a build; they haven't seen progress in a year! Step 1: make it so you can play the base scenario start to end w/o any weirdness or bugs.

A gamedev thought: Look, sometimes (oftentimes) (most times?) it's better to kinda force the player toward the one Fun dialog option you feel is really clicking rather than adding in a bunch of boring alternatives in the name of "fairness" or "choice". (It's all an illusion anyway. Let me cook!)

Fundamentally if your game contains text that you're comfortable filling with LLM slop you're making a bad game. Good design doesn't include text as empty filler the player isn't meant to read, engage with, or care about.

small games by tiny devs finding huge success by dropping all notions of expression and focusing on dopamine delivery has done some sort of heavy damage to whatever I believed in in the 2010s about game design

I need to vent about this. Last week we tried to drive to a campground in Réserve faunique de Papineau-Labelle. Route 1, a dirt/gravel road, which should get us there. At Lac Smallian, the road was blocked and claimed to be a private road. What looked like an ATV trail has a sign for "Route 1".

Goblin Friday! Now digging into my music player to use some lovely environmental ambience from @mesotronik.bsky.social. Rapidly revealing that the code is truly half-baked & needs a *lot* of work. Oops! In the meantime, my latest dungeon synth (-like?) to goblin to: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvLk...

Re. last rebloop. Reminds me of a conversation about bands started in garages (as example of grassroots cultural production) and how, structurally, every single possible step they would take toward success has been parasited by corporate profit-extraction mechanisms. There's no blood to live on.

This right here is so fucking important to tell people. It’s not that people don’t value art or that art isn’t worth anything. It’s that the value of art has been almost totally extracted by capitalists.

I wrote a blog post for @amosolov.bsky.social's Starsector, "Creating Threat", about drawing spaceship horrors. (It starts with bismuth and deep-sea snails and ends in... well, HR Giger, basically.) fractalsoftworks.com/2025/07/03/c...

Aside, game design thought: "Songs of Silence" uses a card UI conceit for casting spells, building, recruiting units. What sits strangely: it's only a UI metaphor, there are no card/deck mechanics. No shuffling, no 'spending' cards back into a draw or discard pile, nothing. That may be a misstep?

Goblin Friday! Easy: scenario opening title card content now scriptable A pain: reworking Location Actions. Of note: - parameters defined by rules scripting - can set to hide if arbitrary conditions aren't fulfilled - can be given emphasis (for plot-essential options) - wrap around location circle

re. last reblop - I did a bunch of art for Heretic Operative! It was fun. (It is also a primary inspiration for my goblin-based game, though I'm kinda wandering off in a few directions with my design.)

My weird strategy / board game / occult RPG is on sale for the Steam summer sale, only 10 bucks! If you like games like Arkham Horror or Talisman, you might dig it. store.steampowered.com/app/958740/H...

Goblin Friday! ... is very short today because I'm going camping. So here are some goblins with a campfire (and where I'm messing around with a set of digital ink pens/brushes I picked up).

Here is a goblin you can print and cut out if you would like to. Also there are items to dress them up with.

Part of a new illustration for #Starsector. I should probably step back and give some actual thought to the design of the combat support drones, though I do rather like "deadly rubbish bin". (I did, of course, watch the Moonraker space battle sequence while thinking about how to approach this.)

Goblin Friday! 1. Setting up for a semicircle 'list' of unique action buttons to appear at a location if you have a goblin selected there. 2. *Though about* redoing the titlecard system. Hardcoded now but annoying to systematize. 3. Wrote a skeleton outline for new ultra-simple tutorial scenario.

Goblin Friday! I'm doing a big pass over almost everything to do with the map, its UI, and map interactions: - making UI elements over the map smaller - tightening up map aesthetics & its overlays to show selected states + available actions - ..and better fog - (also some placeholder ui sounds!)

Maybe the internet brain poisoning of growing up alongside the internet, wasting time in IRC, was a good thing because we became too jaded to believe that chatbots are intelligent.

I had a drawing instructor who told an anecdote about a friend who would practice drawing freehand circles every day. He could draw a perfect circle, just - bam. There it is. I think the lesson is: consider whether that is worth it. (Just spent 3 minutes drawing a circle and I already don't care.)

Goblin Friday! Oh man, it's one of those dev days where there's just a lot of broken stuff to deal with. - Almost got game state reset between scenarios happy; just a piece or two of UI left... - Then kinda broke fog-of-war! (war?) - I did do a good dialog edit pass over a part I was re-testing

Over in Starsector news, writing a big chunk of new narrative and quite enjoying myself. Really fun intersection of Scifi!, characterization, & Sector politics. Also being an idiot and going convoluted & non-linear. BUT I think it'll work! Got some new structural concepts... Any excuse to DS9 gif.

I didn't expect it at all, but (retro tactical high-fantasy game hot take) Songs of Silence > Songs of Conquest. Both _very_ earnest fantasy settings. I thought I'd like the fiddly pixely tile-BS of Conquest... but no, the streamlined art nouveau card-fiddly Silence is just... quite good.

Goblin Friday! Trying out Affinity as a PS replacement. (A plague on Adobe!) It's... impressive. Good painting. Snagging on UX edges, but fiddling w settings. Tablet pen clicks didn't work 'til I started to complain here, then: 100%. Weird. (Wet edges default on basic brush is *unhinged* though.)

This is super cool! Hits a _powerful_ ley-line intersection of my interests. (And it's funny - I've drawn map tiles for a ton of games, so parts of this production process are *extremely* familiar, just from an entirely different perspective.)

Happy Goblin Friday! Short day today (because we need to get to a cabin getaway for my birthday long weekend!) Been pondering the game design: I worry it's too light on 'crunch' ie rules, rolling, numbers, systems/choices to optimize. This reflects my taste in TTRPGs, but a videogame needs.. more.