iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hahahah! Existential dread! Heeheehee.

Could be a good lesson in media maturity. Immature kids will watch Looney Tunes and set thumbtack traps as pranks, not expecting blood everywhere and an ambulance. A mature viewer can dissect the media they’re watching/reading, and dismiss facetious things like “Jew destroy country” as silly.

Okay, stop pretending anyone was implying “Liking X if you’re Y is not allowed”. Adventure media like Trails in the Sky showed me that a *lot* of people can take interest in romance, especially when it’s not framed as one. The best partners are the ones you didn’t expect to find.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I never played this game, but I have a lot of respect for the colorful appearance and exaggerated acting motions of PS1 RPGs (eg, FF7). There’s a YouTuber that does Blender guides focused on low-poly MML-style called Crashsune Academy, could be worth looking up.

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Think of it as enhancing the opportunities of the majority of men who respect bodily autonomy by taking one peg off their competition board.

DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I played Trails in the Sky (pre-remake) long after it came out, and it still brought me to my FF7 days. In the indie world, playing Selaco and Onirism called me back to Half-Life and R&C.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

A lot of earlier anime and manga had some very diversified locales. But Japan has moved to a workforce that lives at their desk. School was the last time they were free enough to have ideas; that, or game worlds. That’s why anime is always about those two things.

DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

While I’m unfamiliar with the balance sheets, I’m surprised so much focus is on commercial property tax. Seems like many retail spots are already at constant risk of closing, leaving another street with a row of sheets over windows.

Someone could just stealthily edit into the montage a picture of Mr. Crabs playing on the world’s tiniest violin.

Sales tax is absolutely a way of victimizing the struggling. A rich man’s grocery bill is not so much bigger than a poor man’s.

“I’ve made 8 worlds and 37 abilities! You’ll see 2 and 12 of them, because I cranked up the difficulty for the sake of repetition and playtime.” For a time, I had the Roguelike tag blocked on Steam.

I cannot understand how they oppose even the idea of letting solar “fail on its own merits”. If your tribal belief is “But it’s cloudy sometimes!” fine, let the solar plants figure that out and fail on their own (unless it’s hogwash!) But no, they dive in for a ban. On clean energy. Hicks.

DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Ehh, the ending to Cairn tells me it’s still there.

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I’m glad you watch that way, but sadly the same is not true for everyone, and streamers ultimately need mass appeal. Heck, I can safely say those who do variety are fun in whatever they try, but I also see the viewer count fall.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I’ve seen the content cycle of hate for Wolverine, and I’m probably not gonna play it, but I’ve also seen some Wolverine fans that are happy with it, and that’s all fine to me. The rage cycle is just so unproductive.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The reason they’re so aggressive about this is, it’s their livelihood. An update cycle promotes a video they can put up that will generate them revenue. Many of them have found they can’t easily shift to another game and retain their viewers.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I have like a dozen very-hard games I adored, that had some great options for easing the difficulty in them, and it didn’t harm my experience at all. But to some people, hard mode has to be this insular club.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Link as a fox? He looks so cute in that Tunic. I want to see him Seek Runes traveling To Far Shores. (Okay, enough indie plugging, it is good art though)

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352 peak is not what I’d describe as niche indie trying to find its audience. Struggling indies never manage to get triple digit reviews to begin with. This reads as intense victim blaming.

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This is probably my biggest gripe with poorly designed fail states. “You died, go to checkpoint” is a simple learning moment. “You’re now disadvantaged for the next 13 hours but don’t know it” is sadistic stuff. Roguelikes unfortunately head quickly in that second direction.

This is assuming a dev *has* enough fans, *and* some of them are multilingual with spare time. It’s easy to praise community efforts when a game has one, and isn’t desperately seeking out new players, like most indie studios are (even those with great games).

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If this nostalgia has an impact on you, I would strongly encourage playing Tunic, which builds quite a lot on that feeling

Huh. One of those comments I agree with, but for *vastly* different reasons. To me, games like Wolverine are an indication AAA gaming is pretty dead, and the indie calendar shows life.

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This gives me an idea for an indie game where Budding Hero is trapped in Zombie Town, but they are equipped with a teeny tank. So, tank controls become a requirement.

I’d actually say I agree with them. Key is, most games pick a repetitious action that players enjoy the cycle of. Tetris has you just dropping blocks. Every conflict in Baldur’s Gate is solved through turn-based combat, or dice checks.

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pepsi @pepsichord.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is me with Cairn (Checking HLTB at 12 hours and I’m at something like 18, still stuck…I sure hope most of that was paused)

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Reposted by DrDoorknob

i dont like that fans are so fuckin cutthroat with developers Following Through On Their Promises these days. it has to feel like fucking hell whenever you have to disappoint fans with news even in the slightest. like sorry we're raising the price by 5 bucks.please forgive us for being so disgusting

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I can say I see the temptation for really small devs that made a whole RPGMaker game alone. There could be a whole potential audience where it might go big, but if they don’t have the means to hire localizers, it’s meaningless.

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This is how I felt with Back 4 Blood. Valve absolutely abandoned Left 4 Dead 1, so it wasn’t a unique issue of coop zombie games. Still a very fun game with a lot of playstyle options, even if Vs was never its focus.

Important question: Is the good ending “They capture the bad guy so he can’t come back?” or “The heroes completely fail and the whole world falls to misery” There’s been a few occasions a bad ending has dramatic nuance that makes it better than the “good” in my view.

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Another thing I’m afraid of is potential for astroturfed hate. All games have flaws. Game hate can spread so quickly without solid basis, it’s easy to imagine a competing publisher organizing it to draw attention away. (Not defending Wolverine specifically, this behavior is hard to prove)

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All I can add is that I hate we have so much outrage/negativity culture to games rather than enjoying the ones that are good. There’s people who I later learn really enjoyed “meme terrible game everyone hated” and it’s a pleasant surprise.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I keep supporting indie devs, but it’s also terribly disheartening to go to their Steam Developer page and only see that one success. Worse, you can see this is just a reflection of general industrial failures. No one wants to build, they want to buy. They don’t want to train, they want to poach.

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Oh, okay. Then I won't get in trouble with you if I tell you that I hack the Steam Add Funds webpage to add precise odd-cent amounts, because I'm annoyed that its UI only accepts $5 increments.

DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Much as new ideas would be welcome, I also think some blame is pushed to Steam for the pure fact that so many thousands of (mostly talented!) indie devs are working on new things every day. That’s not a store’s fault and no discoverability algorithm can change that.

DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I’ve been playing a lot of #Cairn, by The Game Bakers, the Furi devs. I’m impressed how much my meager rock climbing knowledge directly relates to the gameplay, not to mention how they got the entire interface with no glowing indicators or excess HUD.

DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Good people understand this. Evil people also understand it, and find that pretending not to makes them seem only marginally evil.

DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The biggest issue is, games live by logical outcomes. You press a button and get an expectable result. Horror games aim to get you worried about unknown results, without frustrating you. Especially for long horror games, that’s a hard line to tread. Most horror I enjoy is just “narmy attempts”.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The disgusting thing here is, with large-mass arrests, I can’t imagine any basis for arrest other than profiling. This should be 120 counts of discrimination and dismissal from any government service.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Trails in the Sky helped me recognize the “time I waste” to other distractions. I finished it as an adult working a job, in spurts, because I was interested in where it was going. It really helped that the game launches very quickly.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Game developers are not perfect people, and it’s okay to find ways to adjust the experience. That’s why many good games have deep options menus. Gamer brains aren’t perfect either, but sometimes the changes made are to address a gamer’s own imperfections or illogical fears.

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DrDoorknob @drdoorknob.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

“And then, I learned that the 37 levels of if-else blocks in my 100,000 lines of code could’ve instead been a 20-line shell script.”