iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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new Domino Club release is out!! Get your good indie game fix of 9 games to the theme of "Drive In"... perhaps I made one of them....who knows... domino.gallery/jams/drive-i...

domino.gallery

DRIVE-IN JAM

Drive-in Jam. Aug 29 - Oct 4, 2026

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So Many Games @somanygames.co.uk · 3h

Signalis brings a strong survival horror experience, but for Jacob it brought much more when he got lost in its unique world. Learn more in our latest article:

somanygames.co.uk

Signalis and the Survival of Queer Love | So Many Games

Signalis brings a strong survival horror experience, but for Jacob it brought much more when he got lost in its unique world.

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Dr Florence Smith Nicholls @florencesn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I just released a new keepsake game- Bleed Map! You play alongside a video game of your choice, creating a map of the digital space. At the same time, you'll be prompted to record emotions and thoughts from your everyday life that bleed into the experience. florencesmithnicholls.itch.io/bleed-map

florencesmithnicholls.itch.io

Bleed Map by Florence Smith Nicholls

A keepsake game for materialising digital play

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Jonas 'The Rising Star' Gawe @jttg.bsky.social · 2h

*taps the sign with more witch related media*

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PUNKI (PERPETUALLY POST DEBUT) @pun-ki.bsky.social · 21h

You should be asking why Rockstar gets to do this and doesn't run into any issues with payment processors, while the rest of anyone drawing or writing "explicit content" on any platform have so much trouble getting paid

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 5h

jumanji is so much scarier than anyone gives it credit for imo

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 5h

glad this is common - my siblings and i would all scratch at each other yelling "SCRABS" if we wanted to freak each other out lmao

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Michael @michaelklamerus.bsky.social · 5h

I love The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival so much. I think this is my third year playing it. Small MMOs (I'm sure there's a better existing term for it) make me so happy and this has been a really fun one to play with my kids. It's only online every October and new stuff is added each year

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Black Tabby Games (This is Tony) - Slay the Princess @blacktabbygames.com · 01/10/2026

It's Steam Autumn Sale, and both Scarlet Hollow and Slay the Princess are up for grabs! Get two 90+ metacritic, overwhelmingly positive visual novels for a little over $25 if you buy 'em together.

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Tucker Hazell @tuckerhazell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Today, @nerial.bsky.social made a major move. François Alliot, the studio's founder, has separated from @devolverdigital.com and is headed back into the indie scene. Here's an interview all about what that means for him, the team, and how they reached this point! www.youtube.com/watch?v=San5...

youtube.com

The Pros and Cons of Independence | Nerial Interview | Dev Dive

YouTube video by Dev Dive

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Kate Compton @galaxykate.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Common misconception, theres only one narrative designer but they have 50 tarot decks

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OTHERSIDE @othersidespec.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

ISSUE 3 IS HERE! And completely free to read! We're SO excited for you to read this issue 🧡 It's bleak and beautiful and heartbreaking... and, as always, spectacularly queer. Give it a read, tell a friend, help us spread the word! Read it here: othersidespec.com/issues/issue-3/

White text on a red and black background, with the magazine cover on the left. The magazine cover has eroded statues in the background with a figure standing in the foreground. Text says: OTHERSIDE ISSUE 3. Nine stories, four poems, one essay, original art by queer creators available now!

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tarinoi 🔜 AdventureX @tarinoi.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

As we prepare for our closed beta, here's a peek at our latest Release Notes - major changes, bug fixes and everything in between. We're implementing your suggestions, tightening up the interactions and user journeys and adding extra quality-of-life improvements. #narrativedesign #gamedev

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Failbetter Games | Wishlist Mandrake on Steam! @failbettergames.com · 30/09/2026

We're hiring! We're looking for a Writer and Narrative Designer to join the Fallen London team at a senior or mid level. This position is permanent, remote, and full time, which for us means 35 hours a week. #GamesJobs

Night. The House of Chimes - a tower which you might immediately think of as Big Ben - is adrift in the River Thames. It still seems to be keeping time. In the background, a large, alien building looms over the city of London.

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 27/09/2026

ah incredible, i didn't see this!! that's perfect - i imagine it will make using my dashboard much easier :D thank you!!

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 27/09/2026

having a lot of games on one account can make going through your creator dashboard pretty frustrating; might be nice to have an option to sort by most recently edited or to display in a more compact way

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Dan Jackson @danj2k.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"I will always admire an imsim that commits not just to pushing the player over the edge, but getting a willing player to run screaming toward the precipice all on their own. Re:Build's first act is a masterclass in doing exactly that"

eurogamer.net

Roman Sands Re:Build review - a fiendish immersive sim drenched in a vaporwave glitchcore palette

After first hearing about Roman Sands Re:Build, and following along with bits of its development over the last few year…

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jess @jessfrom.online · 24/09/2026

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
― William Gibson, Count Zero

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 22/09/2026

HAHAHA turns out it was my birthday plus enough years to make me exactly 18 at the time of signing up. thank you 15 year old me, at least you were mildly sensible

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 22/09/2026

tried to recover my old playstation account and it seems like not only did i enter a fake birthday, but i also chose the security question 'who is your biggest hero'. why have i done this to myself

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Vajra Chandrasekera @vajra.me · 21/09/2026

apart from the known standard model of novels, novellas, and novellettes, we are yet to find evidence of the hypothesized novelino, noveletto, noveluccio, noveluzzo, or noveluolo. a great deal of work remains to be done

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 17/09/2026

congratsssss it looks sick!!!

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Tony @mryes.bsky.social · 26/10/2024

"3D Workers Island", a short horror story about a screensaver: yes-thread.com/3dwiscr Also on Itch: mryes.itch.io/3dwiscr

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Jeremy Peel @jeremypeel.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Interviewed an imsim legend: “For Xbox to buy Arkane Austin and quickly turn around in a few short years and dissolve the studio was just a pretty dire warning.” www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/th...

pcgamer.com

Thief designer Randy Smith Evergreen refused to work for Xbox because it would be like 'walking past some stakes with human skulls on them' and pretending 'it's probably fine in this direction'

The immersive sim will find a way outside of AAA.

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inkle @inkle.co · 16/09/2026

New Kaleidoscope! Can you believe we're up to thirty episodes already? @jigu.com.br joins us to talk about drawing on broader cultural sources while working in a worldwide market. (Also; get 10% of the book this week with the code BACKLIST10.)

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 16/09/2026

have just read the wikipedia page for this fanfic and the first part of the plot is that a female character is magically made beautiful which 'allows' her to get married to an oxford professor. so that tells you everything you need to know

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Yarn Spinner @ MIGW @yarnspinner.dev · 16/09/2026

It's 1995, and you're one of the last employees at a video game hint line. And the calls have started getting weird. Hint Line '95, the sequel to the smash-hit art installation we made on a whim, just got funded by @screentasmania.bsky.social! www.screen.tas.gov.au/funding/appr...

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 15/09/2026

have you accessibility tested your website as well? having to watch a flashing/glitching video to read about the accessibility options feels a bit inaccessible, would be nice to turn that off at least for this post!

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 15/09/2026

thank youuuu hehe 🖤❤️

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 15/09/2026

thank u!!! he is a style icon 🙂‍↕️

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 15/09/2026

anyone else downloaded the patch with new hair options?

A mirror selfie of the OP, Ellis. They are pale, and have a fresh hair cut and dye - a curlyish mullet with dark brown natural hair on the top layer and an under layer of bright red. They have green eyes, dark thick eyebrows, a silver septum piercing, and squarish glasses, with a mild expression. They are holding their phone in one hand where the sleeve is rolled up to show a tattoo, and have the other hand on top of their head. Their shirt is black with a bright illustrative design of a meteor hitting the earth on it.

Another mirror selfie of the OP, Ellis, this time showing a side view of the hair cut where you can see the shaved sides better. They are smiling.

Another mirror selfie of the OP, Ellis, holding up a peace sign and smiling.

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 10/09/2026

this is for the reactive narrative design freaks. who cares if only 2 players ever see that line of dialogue - they'll remember it forever!!!

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 10/09/2026

i've been trying other search engines to de-googleify and it is also going SO badly. i frequently have to switch back to google to find an actual result i want. this Sucks

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The Breakdown AB @thebreakdownab.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

BREAKING! "Saddle Lake Cree Nation is asserting its Treaty rights and jurisdiction to provide safe refuge for those seeking and providing gender-affirming care. Any Albertan will be able to access gender-affirming care on Saddle Lake Cree Nation reserved lands and territories"

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OTHERSIDE @othersidespec.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Less than a week until Issue 3! While you're waiting, why not read a past issue? If you want to support us, you can pick up a copy from... Weightless: tinyurl.com/bj2cv93j Kobo: tinyurl.com/2fm52kbm Amazon: tinyurl.com/5t3fn4mk Patreon: tinyurl.com/ycyu6es3 and all your favorite ebook retailers!

tinyurl.com

OTHERSIDE | Shop | Patreon

Shop exclusive products from OTHERSIDE on Patreon. Join for free or become a member for just $2/month. OTHERSIDE (www.othersidespec.com) is a quarterly…

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ellis dex 🌟 @ellisdex.itch.io · 10/09/2026

saw a teenager going to school via large unicycle this morning

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daryl "rupert pumpkin" b 🏳️‍⚧️ @hypercubexl.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

GDT's reddit AMA spitting fire www.reddit.com/r/movies/com...

reddit comment:

Hello! Did you intend the ending of Pan’s labyrinth to be real or in Ofelia’s mind?

Guillermo Del Toro's reply:

My interpretation, and it's exclusively mine, is that it's real.

Because there's two things. One is what people call “The Shining Question.” The Shining Question is, Who opens the door for Jack to get out of the fridge? And Ofelia is in an attic with a guard outside her door, and she draws the door with the magic chalk, and she shows up in the labyrinth. So, the only way she could have gone into the labyrinth is the magic chalk. And the flower is real at the end. The flower that blooms in the dead tree. And the reason I think it’s real is because—and this is why I'm in favor of the human factor in art—I think that art does transform the world. You know?

Think about it for a second. One of the goals, with all this movement, is to make you believe that art is vulgar. That art is nothing special, and anybody can do art. That is like me telling you that I'm faster at running than Usain Bolt but I “run” in my motorcycle. Well, that's not the same. That’s not the same at all.

Art is important, and they want you to believe it isn't. It's part of the idea of control. The goal is not to have artificial intelligence. The goal is to foster natural stupidity. The goal is to foster you not looking for answers, and to trust yourself entirely to an engine. Look at the way we are dipping our toes into these things. We are starting to ask the machine, Is this true? For now, there's a correlation between reality and what the answers of the machine are. For now. But soon, we won't even investigate further. We will be told it's true. And if the machine is in the hands of somebody who should not be trusted, then your reality has been completely and utterly fucked. Because your intelligence ends at the question. You don't seek the answer. It's given to you.

Q: You recently mentioned that AI creates 'semi-compelling screensavers' and that you'd 'rather die' than use it. As a filmmaker who relies heavily on practical effects and creature design, what do you think is the biggest thing lost when a computer generates an image instead of a human hand?

GDT:

The three quarters of the process that gave you the chance to think of the idea that people don't think about without that process. Meaning, AI can get you to the middle really fast, but there's a dialectic with the process that gets you to that top 10%. I'll give you an example with the Pale Man.

We sculpted it as an old man, with a face. And then I said, Let's take out the face. This happened because I saw a photo of a manta ray and the poster for Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. That combination, which happened at two different times during a week or a month, are not permutations that are chemically part of an equation. They are alchemy. And then I said, Take out the face, and then I said, Let's put the eyes on the hands. This triangulation happens because I spent a month or two months living with the idea of this creature. And it's not linear.

AI is like a super-fast engine that makes semi-sentient permutations of things that are already done. Creation is things that have never been done. Coming to exist.

And the second thing is the loss of the apprenticeship that one has as an artist. You're never a master; you're always an apprentice. This is a kinship I have with, for example, Chris Nolan. When he showed me The Odyssey, there’s a scene when Matt Damon is floating in the stormy ocean and I asked him—because we were talking about practical effects, and how great it is and that we both always use a maquette or a model—and I asked him, How did you do it? He said, “We put him in a storm in the ocean.”

And you're gonna find that 30% of a great image occurs accidentally. You know, either a drop of water hits the lens, or the camera shakes. I remember when in 1993, '94, Jim…

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IWGB Game Workers Union @gameworkers.co.uk · 10/09/2026

Today marks the beginning of our trial against Rockstar to hold them accountable for firing workers who were trying to unionise. In order for us to see this through to the end, we need your support. Please donate to and share our fundraiser for the Rockstar 31: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/qr/wWq5Omj...

crowdfunder.co.uk

Defend union rights: Support the Rockstar 31

Justice for 31 Rockstar employees who formed a union and were fired en masse

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Future Dr. V @vgtxresearch.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Recruiting adults 18+ for Playing with Emotion, my online thesis study on how video game mechanics relate to mood and player experience. playingwithemotion.com

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Chride Lassheikki ✨ @classheikki.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Our self-indulgently adorable dress-up visual novel Goldie's Boutique is out now! 💖 And it's completely free! 💸 👚 100+ clothing options! 🐾 Cute animal customers! 🎨 Creative mode to play around in! #indiegame #visualnovel #vn #dressup #browsergame youtu.be/TRtr1pXAQg4?...

youtu.be

Goldie's Boutique – Vintage Dress-up Visual Novel With A Heart of Gold!

YouTube video by classheikki

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Kitfox Games 🦊 @kitfoxgames.com · 08/09/2026

Four heroes risk their body and mind as they descend into the underworlds. But will this be their last trip? Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is OUT NOW! A new tactical narrative storybook from @radiofreelunch.bsky.social 😈 Buy on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3794210/...

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Sammi Narramore @narramoreart.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Can you imagine being approved for a surgery, waiting years for the appointment, and when they day comes you finally meet the surgeon - it's cancelled by a subcommittee which has decided too many people in your country want the surgery.

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𝕲𝖆𝖝 @gaxix.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

𝕮𝖔𝖕𝖕𝖊𝖗 𝕲𝖔𝖑𝖊𝖒

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