iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

🌟📡 TWILIGHT BEACON 📡🌟 Play: graebor.itch.io/twilight-beacon #LDJAM entry: ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/twilight-beacon My #LD59 entry is a frantic radio tower game that will test your focus. Intercept as many signals as you can before the beacon is overwhelmed! #indiedev #gamedev #godotengine

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Sound design is something I want to improve at, so I tried to make things satisfying and mix ideas together rather than just using janky foley like I usually do for jams.

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The difficulty curve in this game is controlled by 4 values, so the game just walks through this array of Vector4s, a different one for each difficulty level. Maybe a little eye-melty, but it made it easy to quickly iterate on the pacing!

Home stretch today! It'll be a bunch of pretty minor tweaks, so here's my "design doc" for now. Had to cycle through a few ideas before latching onto this one.

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Dinnertime update - there's a bunch more sound design I want to improve and a few loose bits n pieces to fix, but it's getting there!

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It's looking more juicy now✨ Still a bunch to do, but lunch first!! #LDJAM

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

It's been this kinda morning 👀

Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Last #LDJAM update for Saturday! Still some bits of gameplay to finish up tomorrow, but mostly I'll be working on art next ✨

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Progress! It's a bit difficult, but in a fun way (I hope...)

Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Time again for #LDJAM, I think I have an idea...

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Riotloc did an amazing job on the localization. The amount of silly jokes, wordplay, and strange dialogue in this game is huge - but they were up to the challenge, and the fact that more folks can now enjoy all of that in their native language is really exciting.

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

It's hard to believe it's been over 10 years since Sort the Court's initial release. I've had a great time working with the folks at Poki to put together this update to revitalize it and bring the game to a new audience.

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

Surprise! Sort the Court's had a big update! 👑✨ It's now playable on mobile, with a new "quests" feature, and - thanks to the awesome team at @riotloc.bsky.social - it's now in French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Japanese! This new version is available on @poki.com: poki.com/en/g/sort-th...

Promotional image for an update to the game "Sort the Court!", showcasing that the game is now playable on mobile devices in a vertical format, a new "quests" feature, and new languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), and Japanese.

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

lol, when I first saw this and didn't realize what I was looking at yet, my first thought was genuinely "uh oh is that some kind of graphics bug? There's no blue level!"

Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

✨🧙‍♀️ VAULT OF STARS 🧙‍♀️✨ Play: graebor.itch.io/vault-of-stars #LDJam entry: ldjam.com/events/ludum... Made in <72 hours for #LD58. It's a short puzzler with a mini-narrative based on the theme of "Collector". This was so fun to make, and I'm really proud of the result 😊 #gamedev #indiedev #godotengine

youtube.com

Vault of Stars (Jam Game Trailer)

YouTube video by Graeme Borland

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I can't wait to get more familiar with #godotengine and learn more. It's just a joy to work with, and iteration time is so fast - genuinely couldn't have pulled off this jam project without it! ✨

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The fact that you can instantly run the current scene instead of the entire game also saves SO much time testing. I set things up so each puzzle/cutscene works on its own, and my main node just sequences them. Having no distinction between prefabs/scenes makes this so much cleaner!

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Another example, the built-in tween system is SO GOOD, and the fact that you can easily tween any property and manage/group tweens with different targets and settings is BEAUTIFUL. Never before have I so enjoyed peppering in little tweens everywhere.

Working with Godot is making me realize how jaded I am from being exclusive to Unity for so long - when I find a built-in solution my instinct is to be skeptical and assume it'll be clunky or have lots of gotchas. But I'm finding 99% of the time in Godot things really are as simple as they seem.

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I wanted to do parallax backgrounds and assumed it was going to be a hassle, but NO! Godot's built-in Camera2D and Parallax2D nodes work SO WELL just out of the box, and the settings actually make sense so getting your desired behaviour is so intuitive 🤯

There's so many little things in Godot that make life easier... For these mute buttons, they brighten based on mouse events from a Control node, and since you can set the modulate colour on the parent (or ANY 2D node) and it propagates through all its children (!!!) it was super clean to set up.

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I hadn't really messed with #godotengine tool scripts yet, but I made a couple for this game, including this nifty one to quickly scale/position the elements of my dialog boxes based on one shared "size" value. Being able to make small tool scripts like this with only a few lines of code is so fun!

Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

Can you tell I stayed up all night designing puzzles?? #LDJam

Photo of a page full of scribbly game design notes.

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I'm in for #LDJam / #LD58! Doing another project in #godotengine. It was a bit of a struggle to get some momentum started, but I'm enjoying where it's at now! I got sidetracked by art tinkering today, so it looks farther along than it is... Tomorrow's all about content/functionality! 👀

Screenshot of a character looking at three glowing lights before a colourful cloudscape.

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Yeah! Did a couple other small projects with it before this one and I’m sure I’ll do more - I really enjoy using it 😊

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

It was “10 seconds”! I believe something similar was reused as a theme years later but that was the OG one 😅

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

⭐ NXTWPN10 is out! ⭐ graebor.itch.io/nxtwpn10 This is a #godotengine remake of my first ever Ludum Dare entry, which was way back in 2013! I had a lot of fun re-creating and making some tweaks to this old idea to give it a bit of new life ✨ #gamedev #indiedev

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Reposted by Graeme Borland

gbsketch @gbsketch.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

I've reached my 🎊5000th🎊 consecutive daily sketch! Every single day since January 1st, 2012, I've posted an original piece of art. You can find all of them on sketch.graemeborland.com ✨ #artsky #art #digitalart #conceptart #speedpaint

Digital painting of two small figures standing before a glowing sphere that is sending energy up into the sky.

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Reposted by Graeme Borland

gbsketch @gbsketch.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Ships and clouds ☁️🚀✨ #speedpaint #conceptart #art #illustration #digitalart

Digital painting of a spaceship flying low over colourful terrain.

Digital painting of a large spaceship lifting off in a foggy red environment.

Digital painting of two spaceships flying through colourful clouds.

Digital painting of a large spaceship flying close to the ground in the distance.

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Pro tip: If you do the introductory #godotengine and #b3d tutorials at the same time, you'll unlock the "Godonut"

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

Sketch of the Day is going to hit Day 5000 in September, so to preemptively celebrate I'm getting a couple of its social media accounts back up and running. gbsketch.tumblr.com is back too - just not with every single daily, only my own site will have those.

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

It's still around! It just hasn't been updated in many years - I consider it to be complete and don't currently have any plans to go back to it.

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Looking back at the sketch archives again, these are all from March 2024. #art #digitalart #fantasy #illustration

Stylized digital painting of a figure looking at a shining blue planet behind a cloudy sky.

Stylized digital painting of a figure walking towards a factory through a shining orange field.

Stylized digital painting of red energy emanating from a giant leafy plant.

Stylized digital painting of a figure before a smoky field. Runes encircle the sun, which lies low on the horizon.

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

⚔️♻️ BLADE & WHEEL ♻️⚔️ graebor.itch.io/blade-and-wh... Created in a week for #WHEELJAM. Check out my interpretation of the wheel as a battle system and exploration mechanic. This idea's been lodged in my brain almost since I heard about the jam, and it was a joy to build it out! #gamedev #indiedev

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Was it worth staying up until 5am to make an unnecessarily dramatic battle entry sequence? Yes. Will I actually be able to finish this thing before the deadline on a couple hours of sleep? Uh...

Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Thanks! The trick is that half the options are always negative - even during exploration some of the actions are things that will make your journey take longer or decrease the chance of treasure, so you don't want to use the big wedge on those 😉

Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

The other half of this idea is using the wheel to traverse the world. You travel along a set path towards a boss fight, but your wheeling affects the likelihood of random battles and treasure along the way!

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Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Today's #WHEELJAM update - it's rough and pretty hard to follow what's going on, but the bones of the combat system are working!

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Which has started to take on a bit of a life of its own now. Did this mockup as a culmination of all my mulling over the past while leading up to the jam - and it's feeling like something I think would be fun! Now to see if I can execute 👀

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The wheel is a mini puzzle to figure out the optimal way to use a small set of actions by thinking a few moves ahead, which is conceptually pretty close to something like Slay the Spire, so I started thinking about a kind of mashup...

Rough mockup sketch of two characters facing off in a battle with The Wheel in the middle.

An early idea was this kind of wheel-driven dungeon crawler, where you move in the direction of the chosen quadrant, moving more spaces depending on how full it is. I feel like there might be something here, but I couldn't quite get it to click for myself so I moved on with brainstorming.

Rough mockup sketch of a player using The Wheel to navigate a grid-based dungeon.

Graeme Borland @graebor.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

🛞 #WHEELJAM time! 🛞 Here’s a thread where I’ll attempt to post a few status updates. Very excited about my idea so I hope I can execute it well 👀

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Congrats!! Very excited for y’all 🎉