iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ellis Spice

Gaz Thomas @gazoid.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Hello, #portfolioday 👋 I'm Gaz, 😊 a Game Designer, Level Designer and Artist. Here's a collection of my work, you can find my whole portfolio here: www.gazoid.com

A cell shaded forest of purple trees behind a body of water, with a waterfall and tug boat in the foreground and a windmill in the distance poking above the trees.

A Prison Complex set on an island in the sea, there are tall rocks on the right side of the image, and a bridge leading to the prison at the bottom. Around the edge of the island there are several guard towers, the main building is surrounded by trees and on the top of the prison there is a helipad and helicopter.

A medieval set of buildings surrounded by tall fir trees and steep cliff walls, the left building sports two old ovens, there is a paved courtyard with a well in the middle, on the far right there is a tunnel entrance featuring an abandoned wagon with flour bags.

A forest scene with large mountains in the background, there are fir trees and more autumnal trees around, surrounding a large wide river cascading down several waterfalls, there are rocks to the left side with various ferns on top. On the right side of the river there is a strange device sporting a hovering orb.

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Tom, Legally Certified Date Simmelier @iiotenki.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

What the cutesy Epic PR that's never worked a day of their life in the trenches fails to understand is a lot of us join the game industry—against our own financial interests, I'll add—precisely because it offers uniquely difficult problems to solve and solving them is, thus, uniquely fulfilling.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Coding is hard, creating games is hard, creating *anything* is hard. Yet, once the hard graft is done & you can behold what's been made, be it the start or the end, you can look at it & be proud of what you've achieved. Why you'd hand that to fucking "AI" to half arse I will truly never understand.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

I worked on an open world game that was designed, developed and released in under a year (Completely Stretchy). I've ported a game that's sold over two million copies to console in two months (Thronefall). I've done numerous other things that don't fit into the 300 character limit.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Again reposting this because I'm both available to hire and remain living proof that you could and can continue to code and create games without the shite of slop infecting it. I have absolutely no interest in "vibe-coding" or having AI do any of the work for me or for anybody else I ever work with.

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

Hello, if you're on the look out for a Unity Developer or know somebody who is (either remotely or London/South-East England), I've been doing it for a decade working on a range of weird and wonderful games both commercially and for personal projects and I'm currently available for hire!

The cover image for the game "Completely Stretchy"

The cover image for the game "Live by the Sword: Tactics"

The cover image for the game "Grow in the Hole"

The cover image for the game "A Classical Kickabout"

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

If you feel the need to add a toggle to remove a (fairly pointless, could've been done by a human artist, hire a human artist!) GenAI feature because you know people won't like it, might I suggest just not doing it in the first place?

Text from the Steam page of Motorsport Manager 2 which reads:

"AI Generated Content Disclosure
The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Generative AI is being used during development solely to create character head portraits. It enabled us to create thousands of portrait variations across three age stages, helping the large cast of characters feel more varied, immersive and realistic while allowing characters to visibly age during long careers.

Every portrait is created in advance and checked by the Playsport art team before being included in the game. Nothing is generated while the game is running. No other artwork in the game, including vehicles, decals, logos or clothing uses generative AI. AI-generated portraits can be disabled in the preferences menu."

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Thronefall 👑 @thronefall.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Thronefall is coming to console AND there's a DLC! 🎺 Enjoy Thronefall on Xbox and PS5 on November 11th, as well as a brand new paid DLC in a dwarven mountain 🫅

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Thronefall 👑 @thronefall.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

We've got a stack of big Thronefall news today! 🎮 Coming to PS5 & Xbox (inc. Game Pass!) on Nov 11th 🐗 Conquer the Mountain in Craaghelm, the first expansion with all new maps, units & perks on Nov 11th 👑 New Royal Wardrobe update that includes 20 pieces of attire to chose from...out NOW on Steam

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

But is it truly indie game dev unless at least one system gets rewritten at least twice

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

Thank you me ten years ago and me seven years ago, you really did chose poorly.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

The dream of game development versus the reality of game development

An image of the "in progress" section of a Jira board showing one task, "Implement Steam"

An image of the "in progress" section of a Jira board showing two tasks, "Convert save system to use a file instead" and "Implement Steam"

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Would you believe these are two different controllers announced by two different companies a couple days apart?

Picture of the GameSir Pocket Taco, a controller which is attached to the bottom of a phone and is stylised to look like classic Game Boy controls

Picture of the 8bitdo FlipPad, a controller which is attached to the bottom of a phone and is stylised to look like classic Game Boy controls

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Indie development both requires an overwhelming amount of controllers and also works as an incredible excuse if anybody ever asks.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Beginning to think Blaseball needed to exist just to prevent the same stuff leaking into Baseball.

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

I don’t talk about it much because the situation doesn’t really change but it’s still insane to me what an enormous amount of really talented game developers are out of work. just whole studios worth of incredible people, often people who worked on beloved games, unemployed.

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Mike Bithell @mikebithell.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

A lot of the same ‘you don’t get it’ nonsense from when NFTs and metaverses were a sure thing, but I do genuinely believe folks are building these broken tools into their processes, and that’s gonna have so many consequences short and long term.

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Mike Bithell @mikebithell.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

My main takeaway from replies to my LLM post yesterday is that a lot of people are now tying a lot of their self worth and/or creative processes to a black box tool that’s either gonna crash out or go up in cost exponentially at a later point in the ‘disruptor’ playbook.

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Mike Bithell @mikebithell.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

I’ve definitely mentioned in interviews how frustrating I find a lot of the work, but the alternative, to just have it delivered, really doesn’t appeal. I’ve seen it compared to working with colleagues, but that reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of what other people bring to creation.

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Mike Bithell @mikebithell.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

One lingering aspect of this LLM stuff, even after it collapses, will be the knowledge that many of my peers don’t make things to enjoy the making, but to enjoy the having made. I just assumed everyone really dug climbing that mountain too. Nothing noble about it, no judgement, just a lesson learned

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

Well guess I'll be going nowhere near NASCAR 25 then.

Image of text which says:

"AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

We used AI to generate spotter phrases based upon the voices of real-life NASCAR spotters, with their approval. We also used AI to generate crew member photos."

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Warp Digital Entertainment @warpdigitaluk.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

✨ Special Announcement! ✨ Completely Stretchy, the amazing and totally silly video game you all know and love will be 50% off as part of Steam's Daily Deal in 30 minutes time! store.steampowered.com/app/1587570/...

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Reposted by Ellis Spice

Kitty Crawford @kittycrawford.com · 27/07/2025

A reminder for all you indie devs; it's a hellscape out there, but there is 100% room to abolish Genocide, transphobia and AI use, AND talk about the lovely little indie game you've been working so hard on. We NEED to talk about the horrors the news won't, but we also still need fun lil escapes ❤️

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

The only metrics I want to hear about on this website are which of their albums you'd listen to first.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

"Leader t-boning a wrecking car, flipping and almost going over the pit wall because they had little time to react and the caution came out way late" is frankly not a reason I ever want iRacing to be an accurate simulation of IndyCar.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

Despite being *quite* annoyed at how I probably threw away the win by not leaving the draft soon enough, fairly proud to say that's a P2 in the 6th split (slot 1) of the iRacing Indy 500! Here's a video of the two lap shootout that ended the lap:

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Starting Chants of Sennaar (sorry Resistance series, turns out I *could* resist playing a 19 year old FPS) and have been enjoying it so far (plus it reminded me I should probably play Heaven's Vault at some point!), but sadly it's also going high on the list of "this didn't need a stealth section".

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

That joke is generically modified though.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

*plucks a ripe post straight off the vine* "That's right, at this social media account we're proud to say all of our awful puns are 100% organic, grown free of any artificial-asides."

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

Personally a big fan of throwing the guy into the trash being part of the optimum route.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

At last, I get to do the thing where I watch somebody play a game I worked on and just repeatedly laugh in disbelief as they swiftly pull off things that were very much never planned for.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

It's been a weird year for motorsport graphics, both F1 and IndyCar have these new packages that regularly break, are stylised kinda weirdly, quite often don't (or can't!) display useful information about the state of the race etc. Please, some decent UX for the speedy race cars, I beg.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

The new Fox IndyCar graphics displays completed laps rather than what lap they're on, which means when it says 4/90 there actually on lap 5 and that'll never not kinda bug me.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

It's a bit alarming when the Sky commentary booth is wondering why the F1 formation laps/lap count rules "aren't more generally available to fans", when I'm pretty sure they're meant to be the ones giving that info to fans and were getting it wrong for about 15 minutes...

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

Apart from the obvious "wow it's so gray and brown!", the usual criticism of games from around then (2006! Oh God that's nearly 20 years), it's funny how the default control layouts are *slightly* off from what you'd expect but enough to throw you off.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Despite the plethora of options, sometimes curiosity gets you playing a game that may not be worth it, a product of its era that likely doesn't hold up to modern standards, just because it's new to you. At least that's the excuse I'm going with as I start the Resistance series before it leaves PS+.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

It's Election Day in the UK (in some places, anyway), so as per tradition it's time to find out if you can speedily count ballots with the most accurate* (and only) ballot counting simulator ellisspice.itch.io/duckton-decl...

ellisspice.itch.io

Duckton Declares by Ellis Spice

The race is on. Can you count all the votes accurately before Duckton South announces their result?

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

I fell into a pretty deep hole trying to solve as many of the puzzles in Blue Prince as I could and it's *deeply* concerning that I don't think I've even been in the room this was in, let alone seen the note.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Oh the C Button is for disCord, got it.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Looking forward to finding out tomorrow that the C Button is for "Crash", it's actually purely for debugging please don't actually press it.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Looking forward to finding out tomorrow that the C Button is for "Carrot", because it's next to a Stick.

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Ellis Spice @ellisspice.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Looking forward to finding out tomorrow that the C Button is for "Chime" and it just makes a nice jingle every time you press it.

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