iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Interesting experiments in games and digital art, episode 1 open.substack.com/pub/bunnybax... I want to write more about the weird, cool things I've found and this is my attempt to make a space for it!

open.substack.com

Interesting experiments in games and digital art, EPISODE 1

We’re in the middle of a heatwave, I have a cold, and there’s never been a better time to get hopped up on zinc and start a new project.

000

Reposted by Bret “Bunny” Baxter

Maddox @maddox-p.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

New temporary outdoor sculpture. AI can’t do this :)

Sculpture with a green semicircle base with orange to pink painted willow rods sticking out of it sits in the forest surrounded by ferns.

032

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

I'm messing around with really tiny AI models, beyond just good ol' GPT-2, to see what their writing is like. olmo-2-1b gave me this absolutely charming little fairy tale from the prompt "Once upon a time"

Once upon a time, there was a king who loved his subjects very much. One day, he decided to have a grand feast to celebrate the good news of his coronation. The king invited all of his subjects to his palace, and they were very excited to come and share in his joy.

As the feast began, the king's chef prepared a delicious dish called "The King's Choice." The dish consisted of various meats and cheeses, including a giant slice of cheese that was taller than any of the other dishes.

The king took a bite of the cheese and exclaimed, "This is the best cheese I have ever tasted! I am going to eat the whole thing."

His subjects looked at each other in disbelief. "But sir," one of them said, "you can't eat the whole cheese! It will fill you up and make you sick."
The king looked at them, puzzled. "Why do you say that?" he asked.

One of the subjects replied, "Well, sir, if you eat the whole cheese, you will have to drink the rest of the wine, too, because it is made from the same milk as the cheese."

The king nodded slowly, understanding what the subject meant. He had been served a dish made from cow's milk, and he wanted to enjoy the wine that came with it.

So, the king decided to eat the whole cheese. But when he finished, he felt a terrible sickness come over him. He vomited all over the place, and the wine spilled everywhere.

The king's subjects looked at each other in horror, and one of them said, "Oh no! We made you sick by serving you such a large amount of cheese!"

The king looked at them sadly. "No," he said, "it is not you who made me sick. It was my own foolishness."

And so, the king learned a valuable lesson that day: sometimes, even when you want to share a great experience with others, you may have to learn to keep your own needs and desires in mind.

100

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Working on implementing lighting, I figure I should be able to see where the light is coming from. Hello sun :) (Cleverly framing the screenshots to hide that there aren't any cast shadows yet.) #gamedev #indiedev #screenshotsaturday

2104

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

I entered a pixel art jam organized by @juniperdev.bsky.social with the theme "Underworld" and produced this little piece of the demon Geryon from Dante's Inferno. I haven't completed too many full illustrations in pixel art so this was a lot of fun! #pixelart

A demon relaxing in a lake, with an unusually-colored landscape in the background

120

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Implementing a lighting system for the voxel/flower game. As a test, I made the x/z voxel coordinates vary the red and green light channels. I didn't expect it to look so interesting! This is the best part of gamedev: when you randomly put stuff together and it surprises you #indiedev #screenshot

A field with flowers. The field goes from bright magenta on the left to bright cyan on the right

A field with flowers. The field is pale blue up close, and indigo and magenta in the distance

021

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

I'm back to thinking about this little flower-growing voxel game prototype. The flower simulation can handle hundreds of flowers, but I don't think it'll scale to a full voxel world. But I love just standing and watching the flowers grow and die! What should I do with this...? #gamedev #indiedev

Screenshot of a game: a field of flowers on a sandy plain

0105

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

My gamedev project this month: learning how multiplayer games work. I made a very simple MUD. There aren't exactly any game mechanics yet... But it has basic chatting and player visibility. It's fun! #ScreenshotSaturday

Screenshot of four text-based game clients connected to the same server and interacting

031

Reposted by Bret “Bunny” Baxter

Ryan @rysols.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Ancient gardens II #pixelart #ドット絵

313128

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Sports commentator: wow the Yankees really got their asses handed to them in that last game Some historian, 2000 years in the future: With this quote we can see how the ancient game of "Baseball" included barbaric ritual humiliations of the losing team, such as literally severing their buttocks.

100

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

my gamedev experiment this weekend is generating textures using some techniques I learned from roguelike dungeon generation If you use multiple colors instead of just "dugeon wall"/"dungeon floor" you get these blobs, and then you can streak them vertically to get an interesting "wood grain" effect

abstract streaks of brown that kind of looks like wood

050

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

My holiday gamedev project was learning gameboy assembly, now I can make a little sprite walk around On one hand I kind of want to make a whole RPG like this. On the other hand, it's assembly so it's be a lot of tedious effort

120

Reposted by Bret “Bunny” Baxter

Maddox @maddox-p.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

I’m experimenting with cyanotype prints of microscopic slides. I love the process so much. I get to play with a microscope and do printing.

Blue and white square cyanotype print of cheek cells

Blue and white square cyanotype print of red blood cells

Grid of 4 square cyanotype prints 2 of which are blood cells and 2 are cheek

082

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

been working on my voxels game. Right now everything is the same color, I wanted to add a bit of noise to it. My intention was to alpha blend the color with the noise, but I had Claude make the edit because I'm tired. It multiplied the color and the texture instead to get this strange-looking result

Screenshot of a game with some dirty-looking cubes

100

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

new blog post "Making a roguelike is hard" bunnybaxter.substack.com/p/making-a-r... talking about game design, specifically for roguelikes, and a bit of genre history

bunnybaxter.substack.com

Making a roguelike is hard

In which I reflect on my mountain of failed projects and why I still find the genre interesting to work in

000

Reposted by Bret “Bunny” Baxter

lou-ellen 🎃 @louceph.com · 04/05/2025

self recognition through the other

51402318

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

new drawing of croissants, my favorite food :) colored pencils, from a reference photo on unsplash

colored pencil drawing of 3 croissants on a plain background

colored pencil drawing of croissants with colored pencils and a pencil sharpener in the frame

000

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

was having lunch at the pub the other day and the clouds going past were so beautiful, I tried to sketch them... I don't think I really captured how they looked, but it was fun regardless

colored pencil sketch of clouds in a blue sky

100

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

I'm developing this now because my son suddenly wants to play minecraft with me all the time. once he told me to "eat the squid ink"... and got very upset when I informed him you couldn't so I spend a lot of time thinking about what I would do differently. and sometimes you just gotta start working

000

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

thinking about making a minecraft-like game again...

screenshot of a game with stone-textured cubes

110

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

reading this paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.12115 a benchmark with AI solving freelance software engineering tasks they do estimates on how much money using an LLM hypothetically saves over using a human (section 3.6)... completely ignoring they had humans write thorough integration tests for every task

arxiv.org

SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn $1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering?

We introduce SWE-Lancer, a benchmark of over 1,400 freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork, valued at \$1 million USD total in real-world payouts. SWE-Lancer encompasses both independent engi...

100

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

I was following a Godot tutorial about animating a fish using vertex shaders, and I thought it would be more fun to make my own fish 3D model

fish 3D model swimming in a looping animation

000

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

currently reading this paper, Paglieri and Cupital et al. 2025 (arxiv.org/abs/2411.13543) on the "BALROG" AI game-playing benchmark this is wild: "In NetHack, GPT-4o often dies from the consumption of rotten food, even though, when prompted, it correctly identifies it as very dangerous."

arxiv.org

BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) possess extensive knowledge and exhibit promising reasoning abilities, however, they still struggle to perform well in complex, dynamic e...

120

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

some quick duck sketches at the pond in the local forest

sketchbook page with ink drawings of ducks

010

Bret “Bunny” Baxter @bunnybaxter.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

first tweet (I feel like twitter lost exclusivity over the word "tweet" when it renamed itself)

030