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I love any game that gets me on Wikipedia looking at Claude Monet paintings!! If your library subscribes to www.ludolio.com (our new platform that lets libraries lend games) you can play The Masters Pupil for free, or buy it now on Steam.

Ludolio - The platform helping libraries lend games

Ludolio, the platform helping libraries lend games

How One Developer Painted an Entire Game by Hand in Seven Years - IGN

This is a great interview with Pat, www.ign.com/articles/how... , who also posts excellent game dev content on Instagram , www.instagram.com/patnaoumgame...

ign.com

Pat Naoum’s puzzler, The Master’s Pupil, was made by one developer over seven years and countless brush strokes.

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The Master's Pupil Review

As Rhiannen Austin writes, its "a visually stunning world that immerses players in the atmosphere of Monet’s art. The emotional storytelling of the game has to be celebrated too – the small nods to Monet’s life and inspirations of his work are beautiful." www.well-played.com.au/the-masters-...

well-played.com.au

Artfully eye opening

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Marcus Carter @marcuscarter.com · 21/08/2026

We have a new game on Ludolio today , The Masters Pupil by Pat Naoum, a hand-painted puzzle game set inside Claude Monet's eyeball. Think Limbo but beautiful and calm, rather than harrowing.

screenshot from the game The Masters Pupil, a hand-painted puzzle platformer.

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Critical for thinking about teaching w/ games what kinds of stories are represented, who gets depicted, and getting students to think more about how stories are told. I love writing letters on the computer; and how the game gets us to wander and notice. Borrow on Ludolio, or buy on Steam!

store.steampowered.com

Queer Man Peering Into A Rock Pool.jpg on Steam

A joyful, strange experience in which a middle-aged queer man toddles around a strange island attempting to re-furnish his empty house.

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Marcus Carter @marcuscarter.com · 21/08/2026

Welcome to Ludolio, Queer Man Peering Into a Rock Pool.jpg by @fuzzyg.host . Can't wait to get students to play you!

screenshot from the game 'queer man peering into a rock pool.jpg'. The subtitles in the game originally say 'welcome to the world' but it has been edited with 'welcome to ludolio'

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Marcus Carter @marcuscarter.com · 18/08/2026

Very cool! Let us know how the book goes as a reader!

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you can find more amazing indie games just like these on Ludolio, our platform for digital game lending through the library. Reach out if you want to be able to share them with your students!

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& what happens next in Webbed is worthy of an hour long lecture on affordance theory. hillarious. and unlike Key Fairy, this game certainly doesnt have a spider-free mode!!!

screenshot from the game webbed, showing a bowerbird threatening the player-character (a spider)

Hidden Folks might be a little more my speed these days

screenshot from the game hidden folks, a hand drawn object detection game.

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I'm barely finding the time to keep up with all the games we're adding to Ludolio at the moment, but ... i'm a little rusty at Nuclear Throne

screenshot from the death screen in the game nuclear throne, showing that I only made it to level 4-1, a relatively poor effort.

Go buy it on Steam, or ask your librarian to subscribe to Ludolio!

This Windows‑95‑style game is pure nostalgia and weirdly addictive

As this Windows Central review summarises - "deceptively simple to play but complicated to master" - & hints at the looming risk of Y2K and even more to explore if you keep playing, www.windowscentral.com/gaming/this-...

windowscentral.com

A new retro-style indie game called Factory 95 has caught my eye. It's an automation game with fast-paced gameplay and an artstyle inspired by Windows 95 PCs.

I'm a sucker for these kinds of optomization problem games, they scratch a very specific itch, but the depth of @liamflannery.bsky.social nostalgic ode to Windows 95 is thoroughly enjoyable.

The fixed, limited canvas is almost claustrophobic; the production chains become messy and entangled; but I found this one really pleasant to jump into because everything was easily fixable. Lots of depth, but a nice intro to the genre too.

Tonight i'm playing 🏭 FACTORY 95 🏭, which was just published on Ludolio (our new games platform that lets libraries lend games). Macrobit Interactive's automation sim rebuilds the whole feel of Windows 95, just supremely clever reimagining of the factory-sim.

Screenshot from Factory 95 showing a retro Windows 95 style email client, confirming delivery of a power point slide to a client. This is how the game communicates a mission has been completed.

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incredible lore, love this.

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We're stoked to have Key Fairy on Ludolio because its perfect for discussing how mechanics carry meaning; disentangling 'difficulty' from 'violence'; and as a prompt for discussing game art, visual tone and space. Great accessibility options too, including no spiders!

A screenshot of the accessibility options in Key Fairy. These include 'No Spiders' ("There are no spiders in Key Fairy, but there are things which move like spiders. This option changes their animation to be less spider-y".

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Key Fairy Review — Twirling, Frolicking, Fighting for your life

"Pacifist-bullet hell" means you evade instead of fighting, subverting the genre. A strange and lovely world to explore by @soyoudontneedto.bsky.social . Checkpoint has a great review: checkpointgaming.net/reviews/2026...

checkpointgaming.net

Key Fairy is another triumph from the Aussie game dev scene, delivering an artful and memorable pacifistic bullet hell adventure.

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Marcus Carter @marcuscarter.com · 16/07/2026

Had a chance to play Key Fairy today, which is available now on Ludolio! Owl Machine's ink-illustrated, pacifist bullet-hell about a tiny fairy untangling a cursed forest, one of the best-reviewed indies of the year, now available for classroom and library licensing.

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Roblox's age-up initiative is going great! Can anyone help me workshop these paper title ideas? I can't get no (Refunds) Gimme Robux Sympathy for the Brainrot You can't always get what you want (Robux)

Advertisement for the Rolling Stones Roblox game. The text reads:

The stones teamed up with Roblox to turn 60 years of rock history into a first-of-its-kind, immersive game built for fans of all ages.

The rolling stones hit the block friday july 17th @ 4pm PT

from friday through sunday head back to the game for an epic, first of its kind, finale event. starting friday at 4pm, the world will transform into a final battle to defeat the man - and your participation will directly impact hte outcome. this is an experience unlike anything you've ever seen, and you're needed on the front lines to help save rock 'n' roll history

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Power Network Tycoon | Whislist on Steam @davidmadethis.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Power Network Tycoon has been working with Ludolio for trialing games in education, starting at the University of Sydney. I gave a lecture there recently on my journey. Planning to expand into universities in the US and Canada very soon. youtu.be/fdjgYjiJRt8?... #education #gaming #engineering

youtu.be

Ludolio - How We're Making Game-Based Learning More Accessible

YouTube video by Ludolio

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If you're curious about learning more about why we're doing this, we've written up a bit about the story here - www.ludolio.com/ludolio-story. Basically, Ludolio solves problems we kept encountering in our research and teaching! We're a small team but we'd love to chat if you want to learn more.

Ludolio is an outcome from various research projects at The University of Sydney. Read more about our research origins.

Our Story

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All Universities are different, but you can expect your library to pay for Ludolio, similar to subscribing to Kanopy or JSTOR. We are launching with only 20 games (mostly Australian indie games), but the more institutions that sign on, the more games we can bring on.

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We’ve had over 500 users at USYD, and now we’re making it available to other University libraries. If you think you could use Ludolio in your teaching, please share Ludolio with your librarian and/or sign up to our waitlist (www.ludolio.com/waitlist).

Join the Ludolio Waitlist!

Interested in trialling Ludolio at your school or University? Reach out now to join our waitlist, and give feedback on the features you want to see.

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We hope this is good for game developers too, providing a new sustainable source of revenue for games that are artistic, creative or educationally relevant. Devs can choose wether to implement DRM or not, and 70% of our revenue goes back to developers based.

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This solves the problem we’ve always had in our teaching: getting students free and easy access to digital games. Students log into Ludolio using SSO, and we have a cool instructor dashboard that lets you see what students are playing, and trigger learning activities based on in-game achievements.

Happy to finally share a project we’ve been working on: www.ludolio.com, a digital game distribution platform that lets University libraries lend commercial games like ebooks.

Ludolio - The platform helping libraries lend games.

Ludolio, the platform helping libraries lend games.

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Brendan Keogh @brkeogh.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

I don't want to pretend this *isn't* shocking or ghastly but, like, when digital media experts are expressing concern generally about the data a game like Pokemon Go is collecting from day one, this is precisely the kind of end game they are thinking about.

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Tianyi ZhangShao @tianyizhangshao.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

📢 Our new paper is out in New Media & Society! “The industry is so rotten”: Regulating video game monetisation and divided gaming cultures in China We use debates around China’s latest regulation as a lens to show how monetisation has become a key fault line shaping different play ideologies.

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Brendan Keogh @brkeogh.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Our (@mahliann.bsky.social, @marcuscarter.com, and I) book GAME STUDIES: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE FIELD is officially OUT everywhere in the world except the US for some reason. So here is an actual thread about why we wrote it and what we were trying to achieve with it.

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Reposted by Marcus Carter

Brendan Keogh @brkeogh.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

This is Brendan Keogh's Putting Challenge on DLSS 5

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Marcus Carter @marcuscarter.com · 08/03/2026

So now our grow something slowly plan is out the window, does anyone have any tips for running game design clubs / societies? What works on your campus? What kinds of institutional support make a difference?

Marcus Carter @marcuscarter.com · 08/03/2026

I've thought for a while USYD should have a game design club, so we seed funded it for a year. We expected 10-15 students hanging out, making games in a room, with a paid mentor. Over 570 students signed up (!) and 120+ turned up to our first session last Friday. Wild enthusiasm.

A lecture theatre filled with students. In the front, four students play a game with a pink balloon.

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Yarn Spinner 🔜 #MIGW26 @yarnspinner.dev · 21/02/2026

It's Saturday afternoon and I have a few hours to myself so you know what that means

It's the first panel of the "guy looking at two buttons and sweating with indecision" meme, but this panel with the buttons has been replaced to show the same hand but on a selection of 30 buttons instead of just 2. They are all labelled, but some are partially obscured. They're mostly jokes about indie video games; continue for the very long full description. Labels include "Suffer more in the Blue Prince endgame", "Finish Dispatch", "One of all those free Epic Store games I've barely played", "pick up No Man's Sky again", "Bug husband to play Reanimate", "Ask friends to play Borderlands 4", "Buy Ambrosia Sky: Chapter 1", "Early next Fest demos?" "Chores in Minecraft", "Finish Universe for Sale", "More and, Roger even though it makes me cry", "Destiny 2 for the millionth time", "More Big Hops", "Helldivers 2 even though it's broken", "Divinity: Original Sin 2", "Another screenshot run of Norco", "Replay Exocolonist", "Achievement hunting in A Short Hike", and more. The finger hovers between two central options, labelled "Stare into the middle distance, consumed by decision paralysis" and "feel guilty for not being productive".

The second panel of the "guy looking at two buttons and sweating with indecision" meme is unmodified, showing the guy sweating.

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Marcus Carter @marcuscarter.com · 18/02/2026

The nice thing about writing books is that eventually you get a copy and this is a lovely surprise when it happens.

A copy of the book ‘Game Studies: a critical introduction to the field’ held in the photographers hand. In the background, there is a cute dog. The dogs name is echo.

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Brendan Keogh @brkeogh.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

New book now coming out very soon. Next month!

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Marcus Carter @marcuscarter.com · 28/01/2026

This thread is absolutely worth a read; of course ‘gaming’ and ‘gambling’ are getting conflated!

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Marcus Carter @marcuscarter.com · 28/01/2026

This is incredible, thoughtful, critical and diligent work. Well done!