iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lol. I just spent the morning writing a little system for specifying game object locations via GNU Image Manipulation Program, so I could set the player spawn correctly for each stage. Then I started porting the Player class, which starts with x = room_width / 2; y = room_height / 2;

001

Farbs @farbs.org · 23h

Ha! Love it.

000

Farbs @farbs.org · 29/09/2026

Stupid tricks I've used: 1) The sign of a float as a single bit channel on top of a float that's always >= 0 2) Whole number value and fractional part as separate integer and 0...1 float channels (acknowledging loss of precision in the float as the int gets larger)

100

Farbs @farbs.org · 29/09/2026

I kid, obvs, but also I'm kinda enjoying playing Super Mario Bros like this. Everything is all blobby and weird.

010

Farbs @farbs.org · 29/09/2026

It's kinda amazing that after all these years, we're still making great strides with pixel art upscaling.

The title screen for super mario bros. It looks pretty wonky with blobby shapes and rainbow colour fringing.

What I've actually done is blur the indexed screen buffer before doing the palette lookup. It's awesome and I love it.

120

Farbs @farbs.org · 26/09/2026

❤️ I already have that down and I want to learn a different way (and finish things faster).

000

Farbs @farbs.org · 25/09/2026

...in my quest to learn where to take shortcuts I'm not taking any shortcuts. So am I learning anything?! Anyway, this toot brought to you by me wondering if the player spawn is off-centre for level 3 on purpose, given it's perfectly centred for literally every other level in the game.

210

Farbs @farbs.org · 25/09/2026

Pottering along, I've hit a bit of a conundrum. One of the reasons I'm doing this is to learn where, in this game I adore and admire, the balance lies between polish and just leaving things rough and moving on. However... to do that I'm copying the game as closely as possible. So...

An editor view of a stage from Death Ray Manta SE. The player sprite is a bit left and a bit above the middle of the screen.

100

Reposted by Farbs

D.W.A.P. (Ben) @andwap.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

When your gamedev friend shows you progress on their new engine.

2648611699

Farbs @farbs.org · 20/09/2026

Treasure behind waterfall is in my game design bucket list, right next to secret behind the player spawn.

010

Farbs @farbs.org · 20/09/2026

Shmup tracer bullet lengths! If you drew a line between the front of the bullet on one frame, and the front on the next frame, what proportion of that line should the sprite cover? Is it different when the sprite has a gradient?

000

Farbs @farbs.org · 20/09/2026

I'm probably having a boss baby guy moment, but wow that audio/music reminds me so much of Turrican 3.

010

Farbs @farbs.org · 20/09/2026

Ah I see you are also parenting a teenager 🙂

000

Farbs @farbs.org · 20/09/2026

I've been meaning to say - the face in the corner is so good! It adds so much to the game.

110

Farbs @farbs.org · 20/09/2026

I kinda love that after decades of failing to automate skills they didn't respect like diary management, education, driving, cooking, cleaning, and customer relations, the only two types of people techbros have made redundant are move fast break everything programmers and overconfident white men.

020

Farbs @farbs.org · 20/09/2026

It is so good. One of the few games I go back and replay. Also I realised my previous post works better with the word "look" removed.

011

Farbs @farbs.org · 20/09/2026

I reckon the only objectively correct way to do this is The Dragon's Trap. Don't try to make it look better. Make it look different and also good.

220

Farbs @farbs.org · 19/09/2026

The cape. Oh my. The Cape.

040

Reposted by Farbs

videogame history @vghistory.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

the space tablet, print ad, imagery (1982) archive.org/details/byte...

prominent text: welcome to the third dimension
underneath: an image of a kinda george lucas-lookin' mf (wearing a black cape), using a very small space shuttle on a space table to co-ordinate the 3d image on his apple II screen in wire frame. he is looking back at you intensely (away from what he is doing), giving the whole image a twilight zone vibe.

819548

Farbs @farbs.org · 19/09/2026

detachment (hospitals, airports). Anyway, I love that everyone has proactively acknowledged that English changes and can mean different things in different contexts.

000

Farbs @farbs.org · 19/09/2026

so then they're the threshold between the person who goes into them and the changed person who comes out. So... that's a third meaning? Digging in dictionaries, I found a very literal meaning of being at the boundary of perception. Meanwhile my partner offered up places that invoke sensory

100

Farbs @farbs.org · 19/09/2026

My sister has a PhD in mythology and gives talks relating mythology and folklore to modern life so I linked her this thread. The next day I had lunch with her husband (also a mythologist) and he brought it up. I think his take was that liminal spaces are where transcendental experiences take place

100

Farbs @farbs.org · 17/09/2026

It blows my mind that the guy who designed Marble Madness went on to be the lead hardware designer for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, and the PlayStation 5, and now he's the Canadian Prime Minister 🤯

120

Farbs @farbs.org · 16/09/2026

Lol at the little sword hiding in some of those shots 'cos I forgot to hide the first person weapon.

000

Farbs @farbs.org · 16/09/2026

Huh. It turns out Bluesky doesn't support attachments in DMs? I guess that means I'll post stuff publicly then and leave folks to guess at the context :)

A skeleton asks "How's this?" while a giant octopus looms over the horizon.

A box diorama containing some cheerful slimes and crabs in a forest path.

A diorama showing goats leaping around near piles of boulders.

160

Farbs @farbs.org · 16/09/2026

This is on sale again and it's bloody great.

010

Farbs @farbs.org · 15/09/2026

I know I was just being silly 🙂

100

Farbs @farbs.org · 15/09/2026

Oh damn that's smart! I lost track of how many times during Void Bastards dev we thought something was broken, only to realise later it was the intentional effect of a character or ship trait that we'd forgotten about.

030

Farbs @farbs.org · 15/09/2026

Before = 1 + 4 = 5 After = 1 + 2 = 3 Whatever your function did, the overall effect was to subtract 2 (ie -- twice)

100

Farbs @farbs.org · 15/09/2026

Okay peeps, I've got 4 hours of sewing ahead of me. This is one of the few times my brain is still long enough to listen to a podcast or an audiobook. What should I listen to? The bar is random interviews on Eggplant / Spelunky Showlike / Secret Life of Games. Suggestions? Recommendations?

010

Farbs @farbs.org · 15/09/2026

Ah yes the old doubledecrement, aka --²

100

Farbs @farbs.org · 12/09/2026

Don't dream it, Robert. ❤️

020

Farbs @farbs.org · 10/09/2026

Anyway, my final thought on this is whoops, this brilliant imperative code approach to building arbitrarily shaped state machines is probably still useful for games that don't otherwise impose verb gating, but guess what? That's called Twine.

030

Farbs @farbs.org · 10/09/2026

So for example the campaign logic would need to know about walkable terrain and where lockable doors are placed. Meanwhile lockable doors, pickups, NPCs etc would need to instantly respond to any campaign logic state change. Also recoverable bad states would be met with hard errors. Eep.

110

Farbs @farbs.org · 10/09/2026

Yeah no this was a mistake. It seems great when you build the logic itself, but integrating it with the wider game I found that most of the bugs are gonna come from misalignment between the verbs the campaign logic says should be available and what you can actually do in a level.

The words One Week Later in a SpongeBob SquarePants title card format.

110

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

I'm not quite sure what qLw means, but I'm reading it as "Hey Farbs you need to sleep". G'night!

110

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

👻👻👻noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo👻👻👻

010

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

I solved it by moving and rotating the camera for each one, but that means every layer of every line of text is a unique batch, which is a bit poo. Oh well. Runs fast enough. Hooray for modern (ten year old) hardware. Now on to the game itself! Except... what's that? Oh. Oh no.

A white halo around the antialiased semi-transparent edges of a sprite suggesting a bleed issue with bilinear filtering.

230

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

Today's progress is this! I added the big chunk of text at the bottom, which updates every few seconds to show the next paragraph. The blurry effect around the edges is the result of drawing multiple layers with different rotations, which was a bit of a pain 'cos RayLib doesn't do text rotation.

The title screen for Death Ray Manta SE. Across the lower third of the screen is some glowing, blurry text. It is drawn as multiple additively blended layers all with slightly offset rotation around the middle of each line, so the text diverges more at the ends than in the middle.

100

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

So anyway, source! Rob provided it, but it's from a slightly older version and I'm picky so instead I've found a ridiculously comprehensive GameMaker decompiler - delightfully titled UndertaleModTool - and I'm using that to snoop the current Steam build instead.

120

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

Something about multimillion dollar projects vs just me? But yeah I probably mumbled it and usually avoid eye contact anyway. Also that game won an award for visual art, with a trophy and everything. So.

020

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

Years ago my sister in law asked: How come modern videogames all look amazing but yours don't?

110

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

In my meat space hours I do stuff with a community circus organisation, and I'm low-key mad at them for creating a diploma course. There's already a tertiary education provider in Australia producing more graduates than the industry can use. Building a smaller one is just luring kids to nowhere.

010

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

I struggle with GameDev downturn gloom 'cos the road has always been littered with corpses, as far as the eye can see. I know things are worse now. But the eye can't see very far, so it becomes a large numbers comprehension problem. From the road a thousand corpses looks the same as a million.

061

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

My guess also. Also darn. I don't plan to use Godot, but nonetheless I had hoped it wouldn't get infected with the Unity "helpful" mentality that just ends up adding complexity and obfuscating what the engine is doing.

101

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

Have you used Mathspace? Even odds it was kids who figured it'd be easier to hack the account database than redo problems they understood over and over until stumbling upon the expected answer format.

110

Farbs @farbs.org · 09/09/2026

So like if someone looked at a physical game and turned it into a digital one? Like golf? 🙂

010

Reposted by Farbs

jazz mickle @queenjazz.gay · 08/09/2026

genuinely forgot i did that lmao, also the reason i had to rewrite the entire game to get it on steam. turns out a self compiling game is indistinguishable from a virus

2155

Farbs @farbs.org · 08/09/2026

LOL that is amazing.

000

Farbs @farbs.org · 08/09/2026

Of course neither of these approaches are as cool as what @queenjazz.gay did with World Pole Stone Dusk: Diadem of the Pole, which not only ships with source but also with a compiler that builds the game every time you run it. Amazing. queenjazz.itch.io/world-pole-s... And also a digression, sorry.

queenjazz.itch.io

World Pole Stone Dusk: Diadem of the Pole by queenjazz

Available for Windows

1113