I’ve played nothing but indie games for years and I’ve been eating at a delicious varied buffet! Local specialties from different countries and regions! Everything from fast food to desserts to fancy salads! I love my indie diet!

i saw someone equating playing small indie games to “eating your vegetables” and lol, while we’re on health metaphors, wait until i tell u about “hitting the gym” and making one for yourself 😅😂😭

The game industry has become significantly worse as the folks who make the games have lost power to folks who run big businesses and know finance but don't know anything about making games. My hope for the future of the industry, once we climb out of the current hell, is that we fix this.

Meanderware: Things I loved about cyberspace 💥 tetrageddon.com/meanderware/ 🔥 - A short playable essay and poetic breadcrumb trail of thoughts about cyberspace, the internet, and ephemeral digital worlds. - 🔥💀🔥💀🔥 #IndieGame #WebGame #BrowserGame #IndieWeb #IndieDev #GameDev #Cyberspace

This is one of the best interviews I've read. Theory masterclass, amazing chemistry. Incredibly generous. automaton-media.com/en/interview...

Posted this in that one big Facebook indie devs group and got a bunch of "Well akshually you never owned the physicals either" posts, as if a games company ever went to someone's house and "revoked" their physicals by force, right? chequered.ink/its-time-for...

😎 awesome link to 🔗 surf the internet 🏄 👉 hypertext.tv “Hypertext TV is a celebration of small, handmade games and sites. Sites air at a particular day and time each week. Come back at different times to see different sites!”

😎 awesome link to 🔗 surf the internet 🏄 👉 hypertext.tv “Hypertext TV is a celebration of small, handmade games and sites. Sites air at a particular day and time each week. Come back at different times to see different sites!”

The games we cover will basically never require huge storage counts or powerful hardware, and are often separate from monopoly platforms. Even if itch were to shutter tomorrow, we'd find things hosted on personal websites and neocities and solar-powered servers. TIER is eternal.

One of the things that is extremely lovely about @tier-review.com, as a project, is that whatever the industry's turmoils and trials, we can continue humming along, basically uninterrupted.

New Release: Magpie (v0.2 - Joy). Magpie is a visual livecoding tool made in Picotron! Some changes in 0.2: 🔮 Dive into past code with Code Explorer 🎨 Lots of new functions to call and play with 🙋 Improved controls and help text 📚 Documentation website! Get it here: illomens.itch.io/magpie

🔔 cool link alert 🚨 (🆒 literally the coolest 😎) Old’aVista oldavista.com search the archived internet and browse it like it’s dial up era. literally a treasure trove of history. #inspiration

The first annual SOUPJAM draws to a close with an absolutely stellar turnout! There's a lot of great SOUP on display here, so grab a spoon and dig in! Thank you to everyone who participated in this year's jam and helped make it a success! See you in 2027 for the next one! itch.io/jam/soupjam2...

🔔 cool link alert 🚨 foxglove foxgloveapp.com “Foxglove protects your art before you post it. It strips tracking metadata that platforms use to profile you, embeds a hidden ownership watermark into the pixel data, and applies adversarial perturbation that corrupts AI training.”

For years we have been overwhelmed by the volume of code contributions we have to review, especially from new contributors. AI has made the problem much worse. That's why we are taking steps to reduce the burden on maintainers while still welcoming new contributors: godotengine.org/article/cont...

@alienmelon.bsky.social 's she danced in the wind like a holographic dream before the world died

"she danced in the wind like a holographic dream before the world died" is now available on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/4430780/... You play the very last flower left on Earth, bringing peace to long dead soil. Explore brutalist ruins to collect memories of a dead world. 🥀 #GameDev #IndieGame

Also special shoutout to @alienmelon.bsky.social for the inspiration to answer one of the questions. I mentioned the idea of wanting game discovery feeling like entering a secret hidden shop in a back alley. I was wondering where I had that thought and it's from this great collection

My A MAZE. Berlin talk 'Experiential Design' has been uploaded. You can watch it here. I didn't realize how much of it is me giving tons of shoutouts 😅. There's a lot of personal design philosophy in there too. Enjoy youtu.be/fGbs9IcCyjY

Playing this during the European heatwave gave this playable poem/essay a whole new layer of experience. It perfectly fits my current genre preference of „hey this world is an absolute dystopia with hope bleeding through the cracks of its foundation“

🔔 cool link alert 🚨 foxglove foxgloveapp.com “Foxglove protects your art before you post it. It strips tracking metadata that platforms use to profile you, embeds a hidden ownership watermark into the pixel data, and applies adversarial perturbation that corrupts AI training.”

"The posting can’t stop you. And that’s an important lesson."

Ok here it is, my thoughtful retrospective yet also crotchety post about Manifesto Jam, that no one will click on hotelpaintings.neocities.org/posts/2026-0...

i’m better off for having been mass blocked by the types that do discourse here so i didn’t see these takes about the jam…but at the same time it doesn’t surprise me that this was the response. in a way i constantly reflect on my experiences, even as unspeakably awful it was, it was a reality check—

this is a deeply profound, moving, damming, thoughtful, upsetting, and uplifting retrospective type post about the manifesto jam… and the response manifesto jam got on social media. it’s a meaningful look at video game culture rn. i can’t recommend it enough!!

"I think its why people who have, over the past decade, professionalised, are now quick to roll their eyes at people who are uninterested in creating within the constraints and demands of 'professionalism,' even when they had been that person once." Hits the nail on the head

Do they actually care? Or are they just here for the pretty lights? Are they actually trying to build something? Or are they just banking off an aesthetic curated by big tech and social media? They talk a lot of big game about community, only to show a distinct lack of actual care.

this lets play describing “she danced in the wind like a holographic dream before the world died” as “true artful horror” means a lot. i will never get tired of seeing responses from people that get this game. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl9W... 🙏💕❤️‍🩹

Please buy young suns when it comes out on steam. But only if you want your money to support a democratic game studio existing

Next, Runa talks about @alienmelon.bsky.social's she danced in the wind like a holographic dream before the world died Wow. This game is a gorgeous and very agonizing, beautiful experience that captures the hope, despair, and defiance of our present moment in history alienmelon.itch.io/flower

i made this really cool glitter confetti with party ribbons and sparkles burst. i love how the glitter material turned out. keep catching myself making it burst. sometimes big rainbow ribbon streams come out :) #GameDev

🚨 cool useful tool alert 🔔 Puck's Seamlessifier puszke.itch.io/pucks-textur... “All in one tool that lets you rip the textures out of photos from any perspective and make them seamless!”

once more w the fancy promo graphics www.youtube.com/live/95fiK2z...

this lets play describing “she danced in the wind like a holographic dream before the world died” as “true artful horror” means a lot. i will never get tired of seeing responses from people that get this game. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl9W... 🙏💕❤️‍🩹

meanderware was featured in ChoiceBeat: Issue 17. i’m honored! this is a beautiful curation. “It's like an entire plane of existence where the fundamental building block of the universe is the Easter egg…” willyelektrix.itch.io/choicebeat-i... 🙏💕

Right now the world is full of people who want to code and write and paint and film stuff and people who want to play and read and look at and watch stuff and nobody is allowed to do any of that because some unrelated third guy isn't making enough money off the deal

meanderware was featured in ChoiceBeat: Issue 17. i’m honored! this is a beautiful curation. “It's like an entire plane of existence where the fundamental building block of the universe is the Easter egg…” willyelektrix.itch.io/choicebeat-i... 🙏💕

Our games industry is people. Our studios are people. Our teams people, our games by people for people. Our games are made by people, in groups of people, in teams of people, making people things for people. The magic is people, and the people deserve so much better than all this. I am so sorry.

I feel like this is shaping a systemic issue into just a moral one. Instead of fighting AI, we are just asking "Are you a good person who doesn't touch AI? Is your heart pure?" This is spending energy into fighting each other, instead of creating discourse against the culprits.

people on here are like “this thing is AI vibe coded” about a link to something that may or may not have been made using gen AI, but then this website is vibe coded too. bsky is AI too? we are all trying our best. getting put on lists and the blocking makes it kinda an obnoxious double standard tho.

These are the zines that sent these people to prison. You can order them here. I did! firestorm.coop/products/253...

this is an interesting read for a number of reasons. what stood out to me was the sense of using AI out of fear of being left behind, fueled by desperation. it’s an interesting example of how tech convinces everyone it’s important and creates dependency, but is it really better? food for thought…

all these are news to me but if this one is OG imo you all need to hear about it too! (if u don’t know already)

Almost all of these seem to be clones on what I believe was the OG (?) "magic wormhole". magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ www.lothar.com/~warner/Magi... There are desktop, mobile, etc. implementations of magic wormhole. I'd strongly recommend those over the website.

ChatGate appears to just have “written” an article about the software, but all it does is describe it and its origin. Looks like the original ProductHunt launch page is here, and you can see a comment written by the creator there also, for what that’s worth. www.producthunt.com/products/jus...

(literally) me on a walk, after getting good at procedural shaders: man that subsurface lighting is incredible. wow check out the caustics on that puddle. ...my eye adaptation in under this tree is bad. omg that rimlight on your skin is unbelievable! #GameDev

i didn’t know this was a thing!! how did i not know this was a thing??? 👉👉 www.wired.com/story/best-n...

and weirdly a bunch of people are blocking me over this and i can only assume it’s because of speculation over this being AI but i couldn’t find anything concrete if it is or not. i’m not a fan of accusing random things of being AI because it just helps normalize AI. you gotta know for sure!

just gotta say that i appreciate all the other cool options being shared in the comments. i will never be at a loss of how to give someone a file again. also my bookmarks are happy 😌

This is the kind of tech innovation I want to see. Slightly less convenience (both parties must have their browsers open for the duration of the transfer) for way more peace of mind (nobody else can see, monetize, or train robots off your files).