iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 9h

Even without the genAI stuff, Unity has become a total mess of conflicting, half-implemented modules and dependencies. I was considering moving on for my next project as well, whatever that might be. Do you have a shortlist yet?

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Fan art is probably the best thing about game development. It consistently lifts my spirits every time I see a new one, knowing someone liked my work enough to be inspired to create something of their own.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Also at the beginning of the season my wife planted this absinthe wormwood as part of her Bun-ginot Line around the greens bed, not realizing how big it would get. It's so annoying to step over to pick tomatoes but at this point I don't have the heart to try to transplant it in case I kill it.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I had to rig my tomatoes for heavy winds. The larger ones were starting to get precarious anyway, but we're expecting 50mph gusts over the weekend with 25+ sustained. Maybe next year I should get actual 8' cages instead of placing a 4' one upside down on top of another.

An L-shaped garden bed with three large tomato plants being held upright with string secured to stakes in a neighboring bed.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Same. I have an original rift and i can no longer use the hardware I own because of account BS. There's no reason a vr headset should need an account to work. If we still had functioning consumer protections this shit would be illegal.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Maybe it's weird to say but I watched the first 8 seconds of the RoSa trailer a dozen times because the mood is immaculate. Congrats on the release!

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

It's nice to be at the point in my game where I can comfortable dedicate a day or two to something almost entirely cosmetic and not be worried about schedules. I've been wanting to do particle beam punch-through for years and now I finally have the time. #gamedev

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Someone just showed me what DLSS5 does to my game and I am honestly sickened. It looks awful. It sucks out all of the visual personality we worked so hard on and replaces it with like...a very muted full screen color grading and maximum glossiness on everything.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Oh that looks great, the artist did a really good job. I've got to go with the original though. It's so elegant in its simplicity.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

You already have one? That's amazing! I just can't decide on location, which is what's been stopping me (I have the same problem for like 3 other planned tattoos as well).

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

This one for me as well. I always talk about how much this game is responsible for a huge percentage of how I developed as an artist. I don't think I'd be a game dev without it. I've been putting off that angel moon tattoo for many years now...

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I used to just to shotgun patches onto the live branch but after almost 5 years of this just hovering over the "Set Build Live Now" button puts me into fight or flight mode. #gamedev

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

There's a great post by J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon 5) which covers this pretty handily.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

It's practically negligible, actually. The weapon shader knows the UV coordinates for where it sits on the hull and is just reading the same damage mask the rest of the hull already uses.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Damage decal transfer to the weapons makes the effect look so much more cohesive. I knew this would be a big fidelity boost but seeing it on the hulls with the larger mounts for the first time makes me really glad we did this. #gamedev

The bow of the Solomon battleship from Nebulous Fleet command showing heavy armor damage and heat effects appearing on both the hull and the two top forward mounts.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

But it did get a second game, it was called Homeworld: Cataclysm. Glad you like Neb though!

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

It took me until now for this to click, but I didn't even realize you played...

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Sometimes I forget how many weapon we have. I just spent day upon tedious day updating all of these prefabs with new models, rigs, and textures to match the updated ship hulls. Best of all, they're all configured for the damage decal system. Now to test them and see which ones I broke... #gamedev

A layout of all of the weapons and other surface components from Nebulous: Fleet Command, 61 in total.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

There's no point to this thread, just musing about a weird cultural shift I may or may not be right about. I'm curious if other people have seen the same, of if I'm just out of the loop now that I'm in my late 30's. What is the social environment of gaming like for young people now?

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Maybe part of this is the rise of Discord coincided with many of my clanmates and I hitting our mid-20's, but it still feels like the scope of gaming has paradoxically both grown and shrunk. I see huge servers with thousands of people in them, but rarely see vc gatherings of more than 2-5.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I would tell my parents these people really were my friends, because they were. I spent hours with them every day. I knew their lives. I still have lasting bonds with many of them 20 years later.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

You could no longer pop into the TS channel where 20 of us were just hanging out and say you got engaged or your mom died or something, and people would celebrate or mourn with you like they would in person. You post that in a Discord channel and you get 🎉 or 🫂 reacts.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

People were still chatting but it didn't feel like hanging out with your friends anymore, it felt like being in any old chat room with strangers. You didn't get to know people by their voices as easily, people were only in vc when things were being done and then it was limited to functional comms.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Reminiscing about Vent/TS with some people and my hot take is that Discord functionally killed 00's gaming clans as I knew them growing up. Once we had async chat you no longer had to be *present* with people to be part of the group, and almost overnight it felt like activity died.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Seeing today's Discourse(tm) and thinking about the mountain of spreadsheets I have produced of the course of Neb's development... Here are just a few I've used for balancing:

A screenshot of a portion of a colorful spreadsheet for balancing spacecraft fuel and speed in the game Nebulous: Fleet Command.

A spreadsheet for determining how changes in the skin thickness of missiles and spacecraft affects which defensive weapons will penetrate for full damage.

Black highlights a changed value from the current state and dark red or green indicates a changed result (pen or no pen).

A spreadsheet for determining how changes in weapon armor penetration affects usefulness against different hull types.

Black highlights a changed value from the current state and dark red or green indicates a changed result (pen or no pen).

A spreadsheet for balancing missile seeker costs

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

My entire house smells like basil but I just made the best batch of pesto maybe ever. This isn't even all of what we have growing in the garden. Kalliope for scale.

An orange and white cat sniffing a pile of freshly cut basil that is roughly the same size as the cat.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I also can't think of a worse picture they could have used. "No more fussing, child, you will sacrifice your education and future to create value for AI shareholders and you will like it!"

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Does anyone else remember when we let a total hack develop a new system for teaching reading and force it into schools, and then a few decades later we realized an entire generation can't read because of it? This will be the same thing, but with critical thinking skills.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

What an incredible milestone. Congrats on reaching it!

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Also there is an undeniable tactile joy to index cards and sticky notes that no software will ever be able to capture.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

I've always found brainstorming with physical cards to be really helpful. It's so much easier to write down all the things that need to happen and then find places for them to go when you can see the whole thing at a glance. It also makes it very obvious where there are gaps to fill.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

My Assistant Narrative Designer, Polymnia, posing with the mission outline for Act 2 of our campaign. Each white card is a room. Blue is things you get/do. Yellow is key plot points you learn. Pink is character beats. Purple is complications to keep the mission interesting. #indiedev

A photo of two walls in a red room, with a white door sitting slightly ajar. Index cards and sticky notes are plastered up on the wall. The cards are arranged into groups with numerous colored sticky notes sitting below each index card. A very soft gray cat sits on a filing cabinet below the cards, looking a little tired after all her hard work.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Normally I absolutely hate how every indie dev WIP post is written like ad copy, but this is the one time I wish it *was*. I want to know what this person is making, what the name is, and where I can follow it.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I really adore the whole vibe of this, I've watched it a dozen times. The art style and the music go together so well.

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Reposted by Lys

Samantha Nye // ציפּיע 🌿 @thesamethyst.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

This industry deserves so much better and I am so serious. I have my own experience but I have no desire to share it in detail just that this industry and the people in it deserve a lot more respect.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Panda did such an incredible job on this, it really sets the mood for the rest of the act (and eventually the whole campaign). This was my first experience with directing animation and damn is it complicated. There's so many moving parts and it requires so much time investment, but it was worth it.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

This has been a sword (one of many) hanging over my head for like 6 months. It would have sucked to have to reconfigure all these materials and update all the ship and map prefabs if my hard drive failed.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Uploading 13GB of new 4K textures to our git repo. I've been keeping them on my hard drive without committing them for months in case we had to make changes to any of them.

A command prompt reading
[scrambled for privacy] MINGW64 /d/Projects/Unity/Nebulous Campaign (campaign)
$ git commit -m "Campaign update act 1 release. May Git LFS forive me."

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

There's got to be a reason why I always end up deathly ill in the last few days leading up to a major update release...

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Quote with your purple art! These are the original concepts I did for Pillars and Nyx's Eye. They look very rough but they accomplished their purpose. We didn't have a dedicated concept artist back then so I had to do.

A rudimentary concept sketch of a collection of tall, sharp-edged asteroids in a tight cluster.

A rudimentary concept sketch of a broken ring shaped asteroid formation.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

The underlying algorithm is Theta*, which has been Neb's pathfinding algorithm since day 1. It's like A* but provides an additional path smoothing functionality so the movement looks more natural instead of the stepped grid A* is notorious for.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

This first version builds a map of enemy sensor coverage (the grey spheres and colored grid) and then artificially inflates the distance cost of each edge if it lies within a node the enemy can see. This pushes the ideal tactical path (magenta) away from the naive path (cyan). Simple but effective.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Some AI work to start the day: tactical pathfinding. One of the biggest remaining issues with the AI is its tendency to drive craft straight through enemy sensor coverage to get to what it wants to kill. Now I'm working on some methods to give it smarter pathing. #gamedev

A pathfinding octree with nodes colored by how many overlapping threats can see them. The image shows a naive direct route through the graph from the origin to destination, passing through the threat spheres. A magenta line shows a tactical path that avoids the threat areas by routing around them.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

There's something very calming about doing memory profiling at midnight. Compare the snapshots, find a set of objects that shouldn't still be there, fix it, repeat. It's got a certain Zen to it. #gamedev

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

I can't read any discussion about "hard sci-fi" without thinking of this. It's lived rent free in my head for years.

G.K.: The fatal flaw of hard sci-fi is that it's not interesting to anyone except for fans of science fiction. Its main course are scientific explanations, and even though there are many different stories, in the end they always give way to walls of scientific text. But readers, except for sci-fi fans, barely feel any catharsis from that. Let's be honest, what's so interesting about having to read a longass explanatory infodump? That's why the sad reality is that hard sci-fi won't spread beyond the sci-fi fanbase. However if you make that hard yuri sci-fi, the scientific explanation segment becomes a scene of women having a conversation with each other. In other words, a yuri scene, something that all of you love.

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Lys @lystingdangerously.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Spent literally all day re-rigging all of the OSP ships with the new meshes and textures for the art refresh. What idiot decided it was good idea to build two of the hulls out of 9 different pieces each? Oh right, the idiot was me. #gamedev

A collection of game asset prefabs showing the different pieces of the randomized modular hull system for the OSP's ships.

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