iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

(pulled this from epic's announcement post) Who is this even for? Did their c-suite really say "oh people will switch away from steam if our launcher launches faster"?! seeing one of the last major employers in games essentially saying "we hate and don't want to pay our employees!" this sucks 😖

Screenshot from : https://store.epicgames.com/news/epic-games-launcher-preview
Of a powerpoint like slide. The title is "fast from first click". The new epic games launcher vs. steam
Then two bar charts showing that epic's launcher will launch slightly faster than steams launcher.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Texture pass! Gotta bring the gauntlets back in and finish painting those still and check it under more lighting conditions.

UE5 in game screenshot. The leather armor now has a texture and materials applied to it. Lots of brown leather, a light blue undershirt, and some dark grayish pants. Shown from front, side, and rear.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Low poly of the leather armor done!!!

Maya viewport screengrab of lambert gray low poly version of the leather armor from front, side, and rear

Maya viewport screengrab of wire wireframes on low poly version of the leather armor from front, side, and rear

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Some leather armor wip. Trying to fill out the armor loot tables

Zbrush screengrab. A sculpt of a generic character wearing grungy leather armor from 3 angles - front, left, and rear.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Every crpg needs ancient caves with skeletons standing around! #indiedev #gamedev #solodev

UE5 in game screenshot. A dimly lit cave interior with a ruined old stone staircase in the middle. Two skeletons stand idle staring off into eternity.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

Sparklies make everything look cooler ✨

UE5 screengrab of in game. It's a night time scene there's heavy pink fog with little bright pink glowing sparkles floating in the air. The player character is wearing big heavy gloves and a scale mail bikini.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

I've been working on a ton of backend stuff and dialogue trees this week. But none of that makes for good screenshots... so here's an image of a player facing off against a minotaur instead.

UE5 screengrab of an in game forest environment. The player is holding a sword facing off against a minotaur holding a giant axe.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

One of those Fridays that feels like a Monday. Gonna need more coffee for this one. #indiedev #gamedev #solodev

UE5 viewport screen grab of a goblin girl holding a steaming hot cup of coffee up to her lips.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Hi #portfolioday I'm Slaen and I'm developing an open world fantasy CRPG for adults. #nsfw #gamedev

UE5 in game screenshot of a lineup of the non-human characters in Feign. From left to right Minotaur, imp girl, shroom dude, imp boy, incubus, succubus, goblin girl, slime girl, shroom woman, frog daddy. Standing in a forest scene with sunset type lighting.

UE5 in game screenshot of of a woman in brown monk robes in the courtyard of a monastery.

UE5 in game screenshot of a woman in guard armor with a sword on her back standing in a swamp environment at night time

Action shot of a woman in armor holding a sword facing a slime girl who is attacking and has a bunch of particle fx around her

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

Some spells and abilities will cause a temptation event that will overwhelm the player's control and draw them towards whatever is tempting them 💞😈

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Using lust potions on NPCs can now trigger visual effects like floating hearts! This is still super heavily WIP and needs a proper art pass. #nsfw #gamedev #nsfwart

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

From deep within the gooner mines a wild imp girl appears!!! 😎 Just working on some imp melee attack cycles #nsfwgamedev #indiedev #gameart

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Imp girl combat 😈 work in progress!

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

You know what? It's my game. So if I think some of the mushroom people should have giant cocks... well then, some of them are gonna have giant shroom cocks. #nsfw

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

Just gonna check in on a discord of old #gamedev coworkers. Oh. That's bleak.

A discord chat message reading "Does anyone in this chat have a job?"
And the bottom of the image is the Lisa Simpson's Dinner meme where she has a hollow stare looking down at an empty plate of food.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Think this is the last model update on the tailmouth. Time for rigging!

UE5 viewport screengrab in a temporary lighting test scene. Showing a pink tail with a purple heart shaped end. The end opens up into a pink and glistening mouth interior lined with teeth and a slim forked blue tongue.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Yes!!! Best trope! Reminds me of the old Marathon shotguns "I won’t waste my time trying to explain the loading mechanism to you -- your primitive mind could never grasp its complex nature." - from Marathon 2 manual

A super crunched down image of the shotgun from the video game Marathon.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Quick and dirty rig test!

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 27/12/2025

Doing some imp tail research this morning 🧐 I still need to figure out the rigging on this lil guy #nsfw #indiedev #gameart

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Some people say he's still there, aimlessly raking dirt, to this very day.

UE5 engine screenshot. Showing a monk that is aimlessly raking a bare patch of dirt. In the foreground there is the player character wearing armor with a sword on their back. It's a sunny day in a walled courtyard.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

My game has more than just curvy imps and goblins. There's also some big minotaur boys in there! #indiedev #gameart #UE5 #gamedev

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Imp girl animations! I'm kind of tempted to rig and animate her ears 🤔 Just for a bit of secondary motion. Maybe once I finish her hair?

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

WIP!!! Got most of the base hair volume done. Time to start the secondary and flyaways. #indiedev #gameart #UE5 #gamedev

UE5 viewport screengrab. A pink imp girl 3d model in tpose shown from 3 different angles. 3 quarters left front, 3 quarters right front, and back.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

The thing with showing off my character editor in videos is I want to show all the features but I also need the video to be a small enough size to upload. So it ends up as this frantic, condensed, blink and you'll miss it, sort of thing. But hopefully it gets the idea across 😅

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Imp girls need love too right? Think I'm gonna work on giving her some proper hair today 🤔

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

You've probably seen my version floating around before 😆 to be fair I think I only had 2 weeks to work on him. And yeah I really should've grabbed beauty shots before I hopped over to Realm

Terminus a large muscular gray skinned rock dude with a giant axe and glowing pink crystals poking out of his arm stands in front of a lush jungle background from the video game Paladins.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Don't you hate when marketing shots rely too heavily on things like depth of field, crepuscular rays, visual fx, and impossible camera angles? 🤐

Screenshot with lots of bloom, visual effects, and depth of field. Showing in the foreground the torso of a female adventurer in armor holding a sword. And facing her, mid attack swing, is a purple slime girl.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Someday I'm going to actually animate that chicken.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Some frog dude animations (let's see how the gif compression treats me)

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Started posting on twitter again to do marketing for the upcoming build. Grumpy now

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Not sure what level of material control there is in VrChat? I think that's all in Unity? Here's the math and nodes from inside of Unreal which should mostly carry over. And Ben Cloward has a bunch of great resources www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFyZ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=q62C... Hope that helps!

Screenshot of the material editor inside of UE5 showing a node graph for a spiral material.

It's controlling and warping a sine wave's UVs by time and feeding into the emissive color channel to create the spiral.

Hopefully the image compression isn't too much so this is still readable.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Making the pickup mesh for the slime hood and 🤔 I'm tempted to rig and animate this by itself now. Maybe slimeball NPCs? lol #indiedev #gameart #UE5 #gamedev

UE5 viewport screengrab showing a pink shiny sphere with very glossy plump purple lips from 3 different angles. It's in one of the test maps with a default generic sky and green grass plane in the background.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

Needed a quick break from environment work and made this slime hood. When I get the time I'll connect it into a status effect or cursed item that will trigger from a slime's attack scene. #indiedev #gameart #UE5 #gamedev

UE5 screenshot of a player in a chainmail bikini, leather gloves, and a sword on their back, with a pink slime hood on their head. They're standing in a test level - a plane with a generic repeating grass texture and sort of a gray blue cloudy sky.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

...and that's the last story critical room I need to light for the next build! #indiedev #gameart #UE5 #gamedev

UE5 viewport screengrab. Another dimly lit cave. This time there's a rough path, almost stair like ascending in the center of the image. This path is lit by a couple of torches and wooden spikes. The top of the path isn't visible, blocked by a stone pillar but an ominous orange glow leads the player's eye to that goal.
A few imps stand in tpose throughout the scene to give a sense of scale.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Even more lighting work! One of these days I need to do actual models and textures for all the props 😅 and some actual VFX work on the fire too. Time to light the next room! #indiedev #gameart #UE5 #gamedev

UE5 viewport screengrab of the same imp cave interior I've been working on for the last few weeks. This room is the kitchen / cooking area for the imps. Along the walls there's a lot of clutter of barrels, crates, tables, wood piles, and different pots and pans. In the center of the room is a lit fire with a cooking pot suspended over it. There are imp cooks in tpose at various points around the scene to give a sense of scale. The whole scene is dimly lit, in oranges and green blue and there's a lot of smoke / fog in the scene.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Honestly I'm pretty terrible at lighting so take any advice from me with a grain of salt. But (in UE5) - Skylight with realtime capture Lots of smaller lights and only a few key lights cast shadows Fogsheets there's some in engine/content/ reference www.artstation.com/artwork/zD8OQZ trial+error😅

3 images from the unreal editor. Top image shows the scene with the light and other hidden actors visible. Plus shows one point light selected to show the radius.
2nd image is a completely flat unlit image of the same scene
3rd image is the same scene but this time showing the fog sheet actors placed throughout the scene.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Back to lighting work. I should make dungeons with less rooms - then they'd be faster and easier to light. #indiedev #gameart #UE5 #gamedev

UE5 in game screen grab. A dimly lit cave in oranges and pale blues. The cave is cluttered with barrels, crates, and a few bits of furniture. Imps standing in tpose are scattered throughout the scene to get a sense of scale.

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

🌀 Yes, yes, don't try to fight it. That's it. You must ~Text Block~ my every command. 🌀 Super early WIP of 2d scene effects. The basics are working, now I just need to make it look good. #indiedev #gamedev #UE5

UE5 in game screenshot. An imp in the center of the image looks up and to the left at the player character. The are set against a gray checkerbox background. There is a bunch of 2d UI stuff going on. There's a dialogue window along the bottom of the screen that reads "It- it's moving! What's-". There's a dialogue button on the middle right that reads "Continue". Then over the entire screen there's a light faint swirl patter and in the center of the screen in dim lettering it reads "Text Block".

lol #hypno

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Yup, whatever the player wants really. The body types ride the same rig so going from curvy to swole is a slider adjustment. Anatomy pieces I just swap out meshes. I attached a super compressed and quick video of the character editor just to give a better idea. Everything still needs polish 😅

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Oh you know, just uh, animating some stuff. Mildly suggestive NSFW - very much a WIP

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Now the magic part. Create paint layers underneath the gradient ramp overlay. Paint on these layers in grayscale and boom! You're still sticking to your color palette! Go through hit a couple highlights, a couple shadows, some grunge, draw the rest of the owl!!! 5/10

Top left is the wayfinder reference image of a shoulder pad from https://www.artstation.com/amigopaul

Then the maya viewport screengrad with the gold diffuse colors flatly lit to the 3d model. Then the steps from base grays, then adding a paint layer, then applying the gradient map over the top and showing the final combination.
Also the photoshop layer stack is in there. Also green lines. Sorry there's a lot going on in this image :/

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slaen @feigndev.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Gradients!!! Stealing!!! I suck at color theory but that's ok because there are other people who are much better. Like the amazing Wayfinder artists!!! Find someplace to steal pretty colors from + sample those + make a gradient ramp! Notes + reference source in alt text! 4/10

Notes: https://www.artstation.com/amigopaul for the shoulder pad reference from Wayfinder.
This gradient ramp method is a great way of adding color but keeping consistent over the entire model. All I'm doing here is grabbing the highlight, midtone, and shadows for the golds - then notice on the shoulder pad there's the layer of green grunge? this is relatively easy to do on the gradient ramp by adding that into the darks. Now anything in those crevices will be that green color but then anything even darker goes back to a deep dark gold again.

Image description: Maya viewport screen grab + photoshop layer stack + photoshop gradient panel + tiny thumbnail in upper left of Wayfinder character shoulder pad.

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