iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

No I do NOT keep dying on Stage 2 and now I’m coping, shuttt uppp!! 😭

It has such a jarring inverse effect where you end up dying far more in the early stages due to lapses in concentration or trying to hurry things up it’s so annoying

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Nothing sucks the absolute fucking life out of an arcade clear grind than the game being too fucking easy until stage 3 or 4 please god make these games better earlier for my own sanity at least

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If you figure it out please let me know cos even as someone who goes out of my way irl to approach others it’s a humiliation ritual getting them to reciprocate the interest 😭

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

My favourite time of the year too!! Me and my sister have a little pumpkin carving tradition every year it’s always so fun, it’s a finicky nightmare and takes ages but it’s so worth it

Pumpkins of Haunter from ‘Pokémon’ and Catbus from ‘My Neighbour Totoro’

Pumpkins of Jack Skellington from ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ and Emily from ‘Corpse Bride’

Pumpkins of Coraline from Coraline and Totoro from ‘My Neighbour Totoro’

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Good luck!! Hope you put something special together 🙏🏻

pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 29/09/2026

Reposted by Celestio

a late one for you tonight... monkey ball is one of the most elegantly designed precision arcade games ever made, a game that takes a design staff primed on racers and lets them create economic geometry puzzles, only building towards alien grandeur in their structures at the end. link below!

first few paragraphs: Sega was the master of exaggerated, nuanced physics engines, and Monkey Ball fits that mold to a T. There’s three stylistic inaccuracies that sew Monkey Ball’s unique physics together:

Friction is present as a constant inhibiting force, but in a sense this helps hold the monkey on downward slopes. This gives Monkey Ball a “sticky” quality.

Collisions can and often do pop the monkey up in the air, where speed is uncapped. This, and the fact that the collisions seem relatively elastic,1 make collisions actually a boon for gaining speed rather than a total obstacle.

It’s a common misconception that Monkey Ball has the player control the tilt of the stage, letting the monkey freely roll throughout it. Instead, the player is actually controlling the direction of gravity, offering very similar effects to stage-tilting while also providing essential air control to the monkey.

The three of these combined make Monkey Ball an intuitive, forgiving engine that encourages aggressive play.2 Speed gains are always at the player’s fingertips and rely heavily on environmental awareness. With that intrinsic concentration in the engine, the stage design can then follow suit. Monkey Ball’s stages are focused and brief; many stages have a max time limit of only 30 seconds, intend for you to beat them in less than half of that, and have a theoretical lower bound of only a couple seconds. While the stages are static and encourage memorization, the short length and nuanced physics put the micro-movements front-and-center in comparison to broader routing, and this creates its own form of complexity-oriented dynamism for those who can’t memorize frame-perfect input strings.

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Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

One of those unfortunate situations where you have to hand it to popular wisdom that a good diet and exercise actually do in fact make your life better lmao

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Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Incredible!! Congrats Willa 🥳🍾

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Willa Harlow Ross @willaharlowross.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

FINAL FIGHT 1cc on hardest dips. Win/popoff clip here; full video linked in the next post. Will also do a commentary at some point soon.

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Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Learning to play Cinco Paus little by little over the last few months has been just as fulfilling to me as learning TGM. My contention with roguelikes was never the heavy RNG but the seeming abundance of metaprog shit, which shows my lack of exposure to the good ones more than anything else lol.

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Routinely checking this app to see how your FF runs are going cos the amount of progress you’ve made so fast has inspired me to get my 1CC for it before the year is over lol, you’ve got this!!

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Will Quinn @willquinnart.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Daily bunny no.3453 is looking back

Bunnies sit at a table outside a cafe, called the Luna Cafe. It is on the surface of the moon, looking at a distant planet earth. They sip from mugs while a third bunny watches from a second floor balcony.

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Nuke this island man I’ve had enough

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The entire system is geared to push us all towards private healthcare, which is ludicrously more expensive than being on an NHS list, by having an insanely low willingness to factor in the lives of the (very much real and not just a number) patients, even when the error is theirs

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Then I get home and check my phone to see my GP has text me to tell me I’ve apparently missed an appointment from 3 weeks ago (that I was never notified of through any sort of contact) so if I miss another one of those they’ll be kicking me off the list in the clinic too

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Missed a dentist appointment 10 minute allowance by 2 minutes because I was stuck in traffic, even tried ringing them beforehand to let them know I’d be a tiny bit late but couldn’t get signal and now it’s gone down as a cancellation so just one more and they’ll kick me off the list

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I can’t put into words how much I hate the utterly dogshit healthcare setup in this absolute shithole of a country

The Rabbit 2026 Indie Games Residency - Call closed @therabbitgames.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Reposted by Celestio

🐰 Meet another team joining The Rabbit 2026! Maddison Baek, solo dev behind Hellfire Railway Interactive, is working on Mutasmagoria 🔮 Narrative puzzle adventure. You’re a vet at an alien zoo. Time is ticking. 🎥 youtube.com/watch?v=1LxFJbydxPc #indiedev #gamedev

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Mason @finalmasonry.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I cleared #The_King_of_Dragons on #Default difficulty using just a single credit! Aka a 1 credit clear! Full run in the replies! I estimate that this took about 15 - 20 hours. I did only light save state practice and mainly played runs. #1cc #Arcade

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Sooooo true, 27 is just a waiting room number between two cooler numbers

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I’ve had a really nice birthday today but more importantly Cinco Paus has finally clicked for me and it’s actually got me reconsidering the years of slander I’ve been giving roguelikes lmao, maybe my brain simply wasn’t mature enough to see the vision this whole time…

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Thanks mate, I had a great one! I’m sure it’s probably just both of us not used to officially being older cos you still kinda feel the same from like 18-mid20’s but it’s something we’ll just accept over time

Aw thank you that’s a really sweet thing to say Madeline! I had a lovely day anyway so maybe that’ll be a small sign for how this next year will go 🙂‍↕️

Niceone brother, I appreciate it! 🫶🏻

I really wish these past 10 years would have worked out differently, it’s always worth celebrating another year but I can’t help mourning all the lost time

I’m not even one of those people who’s scared of getting older but god I feel insanely sentimental for some reason

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Officially just turned 27 and I already feel a deep sense of sadness, not so much about getting older just that 27 is a really fucking ugly number and I don’t like it!!

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Problem solving isn’t an inherent part of the medium but it is a very common design blueprint so I suppose the issue for me is that a majority of the problems being posed are neither interesting nor demanding enough from me to solve

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Being forced to engage with a density of variables is a really strong draw for me and Riven genuinely cracked my brain open about two years ago in a way that pushed me to clearly define what it is I actually want from games and why

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Could very easily see myself going on a puzzle game arc for many of the same reasons why my overall taste has been gradually shifting towards arcade design

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 20/09/2026

to wrap up my trio of klonoa articles for this year, I've got a look at empire of dreams, another valiant effort by the now production jobbers to keep a namco series trucking. the results actually sets a new standard for klonoa puzzling, and you can read about how in the link below!

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Cass (makes games) @cassmakesgames.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

New blog post: How to 1 Credit Clear (1CC) Arcade Games I get asked about this from time to time so I thought I'd write a post about it. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but hopefully it helps make arcade games feel a little less intimidating. They're just games! duckberet.com/blog/how-to-...

duckberet.com

How to 1 Credit Clear (1CC) Arcade Games - DUCK_BERET

Arcade games are fun! Here's how to learn to clear one of them without using any continues.

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pang @birthbydrip.neocities.org · 13/09/2026

been a while since my clear so I went back and re-familiarized myself with the original puzzle bobble! it's arguably the most influential true arcade puzzler of all time (tetris and puyo were pc games!) and stunningly unique on every level. link to my review below!

It’s hard to imagine that Puzzle Bobble arose from nowhere in particular, but none of the post-Tetris random-piece puzzle games that came prior resemble it: it’s match-three, but the board is designed by-hand and drops from the ceiling, crumbling only as the player shoots bubbles into it. One might surmise that, in an alternate universe, a continuous lineage from Breakout and Arkanoid to Puzzle Bobble exists, with some intermediary game that blends the real-time paddle of the former with the match-three of the latter, yet none exists. The key genetic trait retained here are the ricochets, a dollop of the basic kinetics from the block-breakers injected into the more modern puzzle concepts. Puzzle Bobble combines this with a hexagonal grid to create craggy playfields where one can sneak bubbles into crevices.

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Cass (makes games) @cassmakesgames.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

New blog post: How I Design Original Arcade-Style Games Arcade players kept telling me that Hyper Bun Buster's game mechanics felt arcade-like, despite it not playing like any existing arcade games. Here are some tips if you want to design arcade-like games too. duckberet.com/blog/how-i-d...

duckberet.com

How I Design Original Arcade-Style Games - DUCK_BERET

How I designed the original arcade-style game mechanics in my game Hyper Bun Buster: Rocket Hammer Action

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Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Almost made yet another bad financial decision (buying a Superstation One despite being skint) until I saw they’re making a watermelon red version and nearly fainted omg hand it over neow

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Literally just seen it and thought my phone was bugging, what an awful change

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Whoever decided to change the activity page on Backloggd to that shit please change it back or I will find you

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Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I remember being so bought into the hype at the time, I was sooo close to pulling the trigger on a Valve Index for like £1K with my student maintenance loan 💀

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Happy birthday Rex!! 🥳🍾

Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

People keep saying Nintendo hired That Man but he’s BEEN employed for some time now, he’s ascended the corporate ladder, won the hearts and minds of the upper echelon at the company and now runs their remake division like the navy

Airframe Ultra @airframeultra.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Reposted by Celestio

AIRFRAME ULTRA RELEASES NOVEMBER 5th! Weapons stashed. Fuel jacked. Police bribed. Are you ready?

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Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Yeah I’d hop in for sure. I can’t promise I’d be consistently active but I’d deffo chat whenever I’ve got time!

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Celestio @celestiox.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Thanks!! Honestly same, it’s taken me a good number of tries to get out of this rut but the most truthful advice I could give, based on my experience, is that real motivation doesn’t come until you’re already in the routine and it gets easier day by day. Starting is like a solid 60% of the work.