vertical shmups have names like "Understated Sadness" and sidescrolling shmups have names like "Glorbian"

IGF judges, how do you decide between "wanting to participate in IGF judging" and "wanting to submit your games to the IGF" Being an IGF judge gives me so many ideas for cool games.... games I wanna submit....! but if I submit them then I'll have to skip judging that year.........!!!!!

"average indie game dev gets an IGF nomination" factoid actually just statistical error. AP Thomson, who lives in a cave and got 9 nominations over two years, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

not a new observation but still striking how many things boil down to the difference between people who get power and go “ok, I better try not to be a jerk” and people who get power and go “now I get to be a jerk”

Titanium Court got announced! I got to play this for IGF and it's so, so, so good

IGF nominations are out and I can finally say that this is Titanium Court, which I enjoyed so, so much

Huh? AP Thomson's what? AP Thomson's what's the name of that game? Finally I can fuckin talk about it!!!!! store.steampowered.com/app/2364580/...

Hey can anyone tell me if Metroid Prime 4 ends with the planet exploding? And if Samus did it? I wanna know her planet killcount

More game developers should study the visual language and techniques used in opera scenery and opera staging

Looking at the Switch eshop makes games feel so bleak... It's like 93% AI slop, 5% real games that are getting rereleased to their tenth console, and 2% real indies trying and failing to get their foot in the door

Happy new year!!! 🥳

a watched clock stops twice a day

Essentially, I think that LLM-generated dialogue only makes sense if you believe that the product of writing is words. But the product of writing isn't words, any more than the product of justice is prisoners, or the product of love is weddings. The product of writing is meaning.

two messages from john, two hours apart

Going into 2026, a reminder for everyone who's fallen off the creative wagon, game dev, writing, art, music, whatever, no matter how long:

looked up the etymology of "doujin" and it literally means "same-person", as in denoting shared interests amongst people, while "indie" is short for independence, for solitude and iconoclasm.... really makes you think (smokes bubble pipe)

complicated situation here, handled with grace by Alan

I cannot BELIEVE I slept on Consume Me for so long. No wonder this won all the IGFs. That's some of the all-time best gameplay+narrative harmony I've ever seen That would NOT have worked as well if you removed any one part of it. Fantastic

Oh, you’re watching the Game Awards? Heh. I’m not watching that slop. I shall be instead refreshing a feed of posts from people who are all watching the Game Awards

Cobalt Core is a part of IGN’s Award Nominations Humble Bundle, along with other amazing titles like Chicory and I was a Teenage Exocolonist (some of our Vancouver indie friends) You can get an awesome discount while supporting a great cause with @takethis.org www.humblebundle.com/games/award-...

You hit the button. That's it. Rhythm Doctor is leaving Early Access on DECEMBER 6TH, 2025! Save patients with your rhythm mastery, all the way through the final Act and our big finale. 🎵 Trailer directed by @rj.dcellgames.com with VFX by thefinals

Still my favorite twitch-action roguelike. Will ABSOLUTELY be diving into this update tonight

It took a while, but Nuclear Throne Update 100 is out now! (and 50% off on Steam) store.steampowered.com/app/242680/N...

I've flown a lot this year, and I've ordered an apple juice on every single flight. It's sky juice to me now

maybe i am going insane

extremely Here For This

last week i remembered that macOS lets you set your own icons and that *I* have the power to delegitimize the professionalism of the software that runs on my machine, so here's a thread of the 16 new icons i've made so far i really forgot how fun it was to just sit down and make art for myself :')

I have a lot of game ideas I'll never make, but I think "Seven Hotdog" is the #1 contender I'll never make it because the idea is called Seven Hotdog, and that's dumb. but [Kojima voice] once you accept the meaning of Seven Hotdog, you will regret your words and your deeds

I got so stoned at a Mets game once I compared the Jumbotron to the top screen of a Nintendo DS bc it had “a bunch of useful contextual information” and the field to the bottom screen bc “it’s where the game is actually played”

i don't really like to give creative advice so much anymore, but i hope i can at least encourage other creators to stop writing under self-inflicted disney s&p

Demonschool (2025)

my most compelling reason for why ai shouldn't be used in animation i that i want to see freaky shit made by the whackiest perverts imaginable

AI "assistants" are everywhere and it makes me want to throw something. They're all useless and they're all designed to handle the user instead of actually being any sort of useful service

you must continue to love the world even when it feels like too little of it loves you back. dogs and cats like you. animals outside can be befriended. some people are nice.

campbells condensed lcl

Put me in the Evangelion soup. I could handle it

friday soapbox: as a designer, if you want something to be a skillful action for players, and you want growth in this skill to be very deep/meaningful, then you need to also let players be bad at it. sometimes horrendously bad. players hate this pain, and designers often want to mitigate it away.

I wanna see the stats on Price Is Right wins. The last player has to win way more often, right??

I revisited my "Trees Hate You" project. I'm just continuing to come up with new ways to get bullied by foliage. #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiegame #ragegame

IGF judging ends early next week, but I was away on my honeymoon for like 80% of the judging period, so I've got some catching up to do 😫 I'm still at 21 games rated, but most of those are just games I'd already played this year. Gotta try some weirder niche ones!

testing some ideas out! based on concept by @koboldscrossing.bsky.social! #Blender3d #b3d

I wonder how many tabs I've closed in my life

Huge AI button gets added to Notion. I ask the AI how to get rid of the button. It's unable to help. Useless