iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Opinion request!! What game has the best gamepad inventory UX? Specifically for inventory heavy games like Minecraft style building/survival games, or fiddly RPG's. I always play these games on PC, so I don't have a good sense if developers have found a common solution recently.

Dragon Quest Builders UI (gameuidatabase.com)

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Makkon @makkon.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm immensely proud to announce that my texture library that's been in the making for nearly a decade is now available on my itchio store for indie devs to purchase commercial licenses. makkon.itch.io

screenshot of my itchio store, showing several texture packs available for purchse

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There's an anti/shill AI discussion about "AI is soo good, why isn't the economy TRANSFORMING" and I feel like game developers know that the prototype you make for pre-production is like, 5% of the work, and has very little economical impact.

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Zi @majormcdoom.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Mathy math. 🐧📐📈 #GodotEngine #gamedev #indiedev

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I don't know why thew format of this show gets me in stitches every time! "Both you're characters are named John." ... "He's kiiinda like Mr Beast." 💀 youtu.be/mI4CGmvFgTk?...

youtu.be

GUESS THE CHARACTER ep. 21 | The Best in Jest

YouTube video by The Best In Jest

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

A couple of months ago I thought I'd check out local AI models to figure out how I might find them useful as research tools, teaching aides. I'm not interested in art generation or "one-shotting" anything. I was very wary of AI psychosis.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

An especially lame thing about the singularity is ending up with a despotic AI overlord that speaks in an average of reddit and stack overflow.

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What Goes Up Game @whatgoesupgame.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

This is What Goes Up! 🤖 A chaotic co-op physics-building game where you stack and jury rig junk towers to ridiculous heights using the power of grav guns and friendship before time's up! ♻️ What Goes Up will be launching on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox later this year! 📅

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Thought this was an @ianmcque.bsky.social piece come to life for a moment

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Godot Engine @godotengine.org · 26/08/2026

Development of Godot 4.8 is firing on all cylinders! 🏎️ #GodotEngine 4.8 dev 4 brings Trail3D, VisualShader node groups, main screen dock support, multi-bounce ambient occlusion approximation, directional lightmap specular light… Too many features to count! godotengine.org/article/dev-...

godotengine.org

Dev snapshot: Godot 4.8 dev 4 – Godot Engine

4.8 development is now in full force!

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Chaos @shed.gay · 22/08/2026

This has been on of those posts which has lived in my head rent free to the point that when I DJ'd last month I made sure to reference it, I'm not sure if anyone at #EMFcamp got the joke or not but it was for me so that's not the point.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I genuinely think rockstars strategy has been: "people are so hyped to mythologize GTA, we can't let them know this is just a videogame by releasing footage" and now that strategy is on it's last legs.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Everyone agrees that some of the most satisfying TV is "In the face of this crisis, all the characters a very competent actually" and I want to get the word out as a non-anime guy that Deamons of the Shadow Realm SLAPS.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

There is an idea that Bluesky, and the game dev community here, strives to maintain a kind of ethical purity at the expense of some level of humor, or practical realism, or "not having the sauce" so to say. I think the lack of clowning on wolverine footage in my timeline embodies that to me.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Wake up, Bluesky, FreddieW uploaded a bunch of millennial TV ad parodies for his new DnD book. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JPO...

The entire script to this commercial could be used as an in-field countersign to identify millenials, sort of like "flash" and "thunder" in World War II except this would be "I'll call today" and the response would be "You'll call now" and if the person doesn't respond "I'll call now" exactly like the guy does you just light up the bush with your assault rifle.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Looking like an insane person in the climbing centre car park, using kids activity books and road trip detritus to turn the car into a pinhole camera.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Has anyone investigated why the top comment on every other YouTube video is along the lines of: "I'm 60 and I love to see you kids doing this cool stuff I used to ride a motorbike back in the day. Keep it up!" This reeks of bot engagement farming right? Or am I too cynical about Uncle Posting?

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Sasha @n13e86.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Introduce yourself with 4 mechs.

A smallscale model of a very thick mech, pale olive with dark orange shin guards.
It has glowing blue lights on the head, and a large rectangular shield with a pinup (depicting a blonde woman in a jacket, boots and muzzle, riding a bomb).

A mech on four wheeled legs, pretty and pink, with beautiful flower ornaments all over.
It has a beak-like long body, with arms and legs attached at the sides.

Side view of a quadripedal mech with a large tank turret on a similarly-sized cylinder body.
It is dark green, with white 621 on the side of the turret and a step ladder going down the side.
A crew member is poking out the hatch on top, dressed in a tank helmet with Vietnamese peasant clothes.

A slightly snowy diorama of a short, bulky mech resting in the ruins of a modern building.
The broken walls still have wallpaper.

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Elliott Smith @pushingshapes.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Honourable mention to the c303, the 4x4 version that also won the Dakar light truck class in 1983 www.classicdriver.com/en/article/c...

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Harris Foster @harris.zone · 27/07/2026

Just stepped into the wildest Uber of my life

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Parenting is hard, but also sometimes it's teaching 4 yo how to anticipate the drop in a song ("so I can do a BIG jump off my bed!") and how the quiet tracks are actually good water breaks.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I've got a fun GMTK "Count Down" theme gamejam idea I think. Only slightly out of scope. And approximately 0 free hours to do anything about it!

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Stonks: I was putting off making a RAM upgrade, because of the insane prices. But realised I can sell my old RAM for the insane prices, and that's half the price of a new kit. Plus, maybe there will be a lawsuit about cartel price fixing and I could get a small payout one day! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

I didn't really take any photos at Develop this year, so glad to find one taken by the GI Biz photographer. @andrewfray.dev, was introducing me to James Adey here, who then gave us an emphatic pitch for www.aiandgamesconference.com. (They should give him a commission because I am genuinely sold.)

Andrew, James, and myself standing on the Brighton pier at Develop Conference 2026.

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Sam Barlow 🔥 @mrsambarlow.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

If a team makes a game that gets great reviews and doesn't sell, that's a biz failing but the silver lining is you caught lighting in a bottle -- protect that team! It's worth its weight in gold. If you jettison the team but keep the biz people, I don't know what to tell you

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SpaghetMeNot @spaghetmenot.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

My next release will be "vertLab" 🔬🧪 Tools to create attributes directly on geometry including curvature, ambient occlusion, thickness etc. Roughly 10x faster than my previous free ao solution. (Just needs some final touches, docs etc.) #b3d #geometrynodes

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

There goes another Develop. Always a good time catching up and meeting friends of friends of friends. It makes the UK games industry feel like friends all the way down.

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✨queue rival wings✨ @rivalwings.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

saw this post years ago and will never ever forget it. sometimes you need to tend to the place from which you create, before you can create again

Screenshot of a tumblr post by user aureliobooks that reads: My dad likes to call the stretches of time where you’re not creating “dreaming periods” and says that they’re meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you’re able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. Sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they’re natural and healthy and needed—things that should be embraced rather than feared.

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Chris Plante @plante.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

i really appreciate how Hayes both names the specific reporting he’s arguing against and spotlights some strong alternatives

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

This weekend I began to set up baby's first CICD pipeline on my local gitea server. One of the fun things about trying to learn this stuff at home is it starts to demystify stuff I would never dare touch in production (as the art team). IDK this stuff is like magic to my artist brain.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

To give some of these layoffs a bit of scale, 50 people is enough to fill a AA studio, deliver a game in 2~4 years with the help of a very normal amount of outsourcing, AND have an internal team working on prototypes or handling pre-production of a second project.

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Jason Schreier @jasonschreier.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I want to re-emphasize one part of this Xbox story: Half of the 3,200 cuts are happening today and half are happening in the next 12 months. In other words, even people who survived today's layoffs will have to spend the coming year wondering if they're going to be next.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Okay here's my 3 big swing, pessimistic as fuck predictions about the next 5-10 years of the games industry. They may be bleak, but this is just for fun. 1. Short trend of releasing a lite/demo version of games on Roblox for UA (see prev repost for context). Probably publisher funded outsourcing.

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jacob mills ✉️🦝🚲 @jacobwmills.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

the quote tweet is great but the whole original post is a pretty interesting read, especially this section which i think is very relevant in this, the age of layoffs, studio closures, and the chronic loss of institutional knowledge

From that perspective, I can say that Dark Souls didn’t suddenly become a massive success overnight. It was the result of everything Miyazaki and his team had built up through their previous titles.

Today, he receives offers from all over the world, but when I think back to the days when he and his team were struggling the most, many of those offers seem like they’re coming from people who only know who they are today. Some of them almost feel like complete reversals in attitude. Well, that’s just my personal perspective.

Personally, I had grown tired of people who would simply compare games by saying things like, “That title cost X billion yen to make and sold Y million copies,” and then use nothing but those numbers to judge them against other games. There were so many people who couldn’t appreciate the journey or the growth of the developers themselves. Anyone can look at the current numbers—they’re available to everyone. Whenever I heard those kinds of opinions, I always thought, “That’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s never actually developed games.”
What surprised me even more was that, even if people couldn’t properly evaluate that journey, almost nobody even seemed interested in trying to understand the process of how those developers gradually reached where they are today.
(I'm NOT talking about the fan community).

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

I don't think we are far from seeing a game launch with a roblox "demo", or lite port, that tries to capture users on the platform with express purpose of directing them to a stand-alone release.

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Anna 🌿👁️ @annacwebs.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

The old games industry is dying. The new games industry is struggling to be born. Now is the time of absolutely batshit corporate decision-making.

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SpaghetMeNot @spaghetmenot.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

normalMagic 2.0 is here 🥳 #b3d

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Just with all the news surrounding GTA and Rockstar, I think it's worth mentioning: In the current modus operandi of AAA game publishers, there is NO amount of success GTA could realistically achieve that would prevent Take Two from initiating layoffs across their studios.

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Ian Maclure @fearian.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I'm always telling people my goose value is off the charts. They say "just tap your card" or "we still need you to pay"... Just egg brained stuff.

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Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com · 24/06/2026

A cartoonist named Daniel "Des" Rolando Sanchez Estrada was tried as a terrorist and sentenced to 30 years in prison for having anti-Trump comics in his car. Prosecutors connected him to a 2025 anti-ICE protest he didn't even attend because he was in the same book club as others who were.

A photo of Daniel "Des" Rolando Sanchez Estrada, who looks like a cuddly and rad dude, smiling while holding a sketchbook full of drawings of baby hippos.

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Mike Bithell @mikebithell.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Good level of transparency here. For me, this sounds like a reasonable set of stances and safeguards for an open source project. Above all, yeah, I dig the honesty, lets each dev make their own call.

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Sinan Kose @thesinankose.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

The best moment was when he was asked what "change" meant he said it meant "changing the things that need changing and that is the change I will bring about." Just a perfect summary of how much of a middle manager void he was.

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Zi @majormcdoom.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Thought dump (no discussion): If you don't like an engine's leadership's stance on AI, you can push for change, or stop using/supporting it. That's power. But if your aim is to avoid "tainted code", please consider what that actually means for you. Thread. 🧵👇 #gamedev #indiedev

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Sheng Lam @8bitwizard.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

more sketchbook drawings

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Jón Kristinsson @jonkk.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

hadn't seen the new TMNT short yet, it's absolutely delightful. "AI suuuuuucks.." www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-8X...

youtube.com

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 - Lost in New Jersey | Full Short | HD

YouTube video by Moviepicx

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