every time Maelle yells Gustave don't die I think of Chvrches' Good Girls

Giving Clair Obscur another try and I'm a few hours in. I still find it kind of disjointed and disorienting in the way it handles game mode switching, but the characters and story are compelling enough that I'm willing to try to ignore that.

Saw Michael. It's not by any means a great movie, but it was a great time at the movie theater, with a big, enthusiastic crowd. And there's a lot of value in that. I missed that.

I adore the tutorial levels in Mio: Memories in Orbit. I'd totally play a whole game that looked like this. Of course, it took me over a dozen tries to get through this tutorial, so my experience of Mio is... maybe a bit more of this than it's intended to be anyway

This book is so FIRE 🔥🔥 #TheGodsAwoke #BookSky #Matriarchy @reasie.bsky.social

Stumbled across this old character art I'd totally forgotten about while looking for another file. I still like them.

If you don't spend time doing a thing badly, you'll never learn to do it well. Everyone is bad at everything at first, some people are just better at keeping that part to themselves. But doing things badly is fun too, as long as you just enjoy the thing and don't sweat the outcome. That comes later.

Sometimes I think about a gdc years ago where one person was unhelpfully grumpy and critical about our indie game. It's weird how that sticks with you, how you forget the other person who was swept up in the experience and said it was the best thing on the floor. Please don't be the grumpy person

pixelly twinkling stars in Exophobia make me happy

Tinselfly now has formalized knowledge of where the player should go to move the story along, which will be used to drive companion behaviors. Using NavMesh to figure out the direction the player needs to go immediately, which is driving the position of this debug wire sphere. #unity3d #indiedev

📢 If you're a content creator and are interested in a preview code for Songs of Glimmerwick apply here forms.gle/bVovVirCkkwL... 🎵😄

Learned you can have scripts run when you save a scene in Unity, which is great when you need to validate objects across a whole scene. I'm using it to save the positions of certain GameObjects in other ScriptableObjects, so that information can be accessed before the scenes have finished loading.

Saw Crime 101 and loved it. It's beautifully composed, and lets the visuals do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of character, setting, story and themes. And, also surprisingly touching at the end.

Considering getting Clair Obscur. Played a little with a game pass trial and found combat confusing, transitions jarring and got lost a lot. But it gnaws at me. The characters and story were fascinating. I might end up loving the experience as much as I'm ambivalent about the mechanics.

Working on #startrek ship nacelle cap geometry and material. Learning about Substrate in #unreal, #blender geometry nodes, and what it takes to make things look realistic. (it takes a lot) (like, a whole lot)

Cleaning up the topology on the nacelle struts. I frequently try to find (or make) tools to automate this sort of thing but it always always ends up being faster to just do it by hand. #startrek #blender3d

Made this #startrek -y ship section quads only just to see if I could do it. that was a lot of triangles and ngons to deal with but I think I'm getting better at this #blender3d

every time I snap the lid of my shampoo bottle closed it sends a few small bubbles floating through the air which is a little surprising every time, and it's just this random little thing that makes my days feel better

Hi #teaseyagame! Tinselfly is a first person narrative game with... 🧩Character driven puzzles! 🪐A wacky science fantasy setting! ⚙️A story about an engineer who herds fairies, coming to terms with the crushing banality of getting her dream job on a spaceship! store.steampowered.com/app/1113840/...

Finally getting around to setting up the new AI Navigation components in #unity3d and I really love them. It's so much easier to get nav meshes where I want them... and only where I want them.

give me six hours to chop down a tree and i will spend the first twelve sipping hot chocolate and reading about axes

I got to try Forbidden Jungle for the first time last week and loved it! Really curious where they're going with this one.

There's something kinda relaxing about doing optimization passes in #Unity3d. Went from 16 FPS to 90, and 12,000 draw calls to 1,900 by combining meshes, cleaning up this shader-level flight sim effect, and doing some manual culling since Unity's occlusion culling isn't cooperating. #indiegame

Music player served up Henryk Gorecki's Symphony #3 followed by James Newton Howard's Flying from the 2003 Peter Pan. Which was a surprisingly fluid transition. Which was also kinda hilarious since I associate the former with a horrific movie plane crash and the latter with uh flying.

Completely by accident, the lighting for the Starfleet delta on this here U.S.S. Lollipop ended up being... Starfleet delta shaped. Excited about running with that. #StarTrek

have a bear

Learning Unreal rendering by making #startrek ship continues. Currently testing how it looks with different lighting conditions, which I've never done before. Hopefully there's an interesting textural quality to the self illumination on the no-external-lights one, which I've never tried either.

ATTENTION BAJORAN WORKERS #STARTREK #SISKO197

Starting texturing in Unreal (my first time doing it). Reflections just work, lighting is easy to set up, and it's been easy to do things like add a subtle pearlescent finish with Substrate. Still finding Unreal's UI quite fussy, but I'm getting more comfortable with it every day. #startrek

Here we go again. When I need to learn a new modeling tool, technique or render engine, I make something Enterprise-ish. This time I'm learning Godot just for fun, and Unreal for work. Also doing shapes like these in Blender, faster. Starting with a variation of a design I did in 2022. #startrek

Got some new glasses! Less overtly wacky than my usual fare but hopefully still interesting

Continuing to get comfortable with ClipStudio, experimenting with different brushes and techniques. Per-stroke random color variation is great for drawing hair.

Started another Tinselfly in-world poster, a fashion ad. I feel a bit gross drawing someone in a look! pretty person! buy stuff! way, but like the real world that's part of the world your character lives in and that's relevant when you'll see this. And hopefully she's not too idealized model-y?

Visiting this cozy bookstore in Tinselfly won't be a huge part of the game, but I still hope it looks like a place you'd want to visit #screenshotsaturday #indiegame

Time for a pinned intro! My name is Brian, and I'm a full time Unreal developer making medical training games, I'm working on a Unity narrative game called Tinselfly in my free time, learning Godot, do the occasional random Star Trek-inspired art and generally like trying to make pretty things.

Great dinner, great conversation, Legos, cocoa and still learning new things about @reasie.bsky.social just a week shy of 29 years after our first date

My and @ebwizdx.bsky.social’s new #LevelDesign book about action-adventure and Metroidvania style games is now officially RELEASED! It also includes tutorials to help you get started making your own adventure game in the GB Studio engine! Check it out at: www.routledge.com/World-Design...

Feeling burnt out on Unreal day job and Unity almost-a-second-job indie dev, so on the advice of a friend I'm trying Godot as a way of doing something both creative and refreshing, like I dunno taking a break from painting to doodle a little I think it's working. I really, really like Godot so far.

time for some delicious emergency holographic dinner since we didn't feel like cooking! except we have no canned spaghetti sauce so we're making it from scratch so it's not so emergency or holographic anymore

21K Followers now! To celebrate if you're an indie game dev and fancy a signal boost, drop a link to your game in the replies and I'll repost 👍🏻 #IndieGameShare

life lessons I'm learning from UFO 50's Overbold: make things a harder now to make them easier later fail quickly always make sure you have room to move listen fail repeatedly saving up is good but so is using what you have, and what you can get, well fail try again try again try again

Finally got around seeing Last Voyage of the Demeter (very shortly after seeing Nosferatu) and mostly I just thought of it like an Alien movie as a period piece instead of sci-fi. Though the eponymous ship itself seemed like a nicely shot, creepy setting for everything.

this mini burrito bowl is too big for me can I get a burrito cup

Added my new painting to the game world. Colors ended up a little washed out, but hopefully it's adding a feeling of history to the space. Looking forward to making more of these! #screenshotsaturday

Started playing Minishoot Adventures and find it... kind of relaxing? It's bullet hell, but at least on the difficulty mode I'm on there's a soothing, meditative, almost dance-like quality to dodging bullets.

On the blog: as I think about new year's resolutions, I consider the audacity of contentment. https://www.marievibbert.com/the-audacity-of-contentment/ photo by Christina Ramirez.

made steak for the first time in years it caught fire and was delicious

Declaring this painting done. Here's the Blender study and final painting. Roughing everything out in 3d first worked really well. I should do this more. There were gonna be some people in foreground but I figured they'd take too long, and would kind of distract from the important imagery anyway.

Using Blender to rough out composition and colors for a new Tinselfly painting, to be painted over in ClipStudio. The goal is to make something a little Rembrandt-ish though obviously I'm... not a great painter. Let's see how far I get. Never a thumbnail like this before, it's really helpful!

more drydocks should be festive and or purple