iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 1h

#OSTober 11: Song that gets stuck in your head So fun fact, I almost never get music stuck in my head. Something about how my brain works. So I'll instead pick one I've recently been listening to a _lot_. Xenon, from Xenon: Mugen No Shitai

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[Nec PC-98 Soundtrack - YM2203] Xenon Mugen No Shitai - Track 17 Xenon [Remastered & Enhanced]

YouTube video by RetroGamesClub

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 22h

I wonder at what point investors will start suing people for committing fraud by lying about their AI products. The entire AI industry is like Theranos x 10,000. Maybe if they were led by women they, too, would be held accountable

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I keep copy-pasting the tag and date and forgetting to update the date, whoops. The last three days have all been October 8th, I don't make the rules

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

#OSTober 8: "Normal" Boss Battle I'm interpreting this as non-climactic boss theme, basically, hahah. Let's go with Bonetrousle this time. Toby Fox has done a lot of great music but this one is always near the top

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Undertale - Papyrus Theme Song - Bonetrousle

YouTube video by Krib

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Not at all! I have not played the first two

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Found a good blog post on this topic by @mokkograd.net mokkograd.net/posts/2026-0...

mokkograd.net

Blog Post

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I just realized that my past thread I linked to was a reponse to the exact same prompt by the exact same account, a year ago, lmao I gotta log off

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

A game — maybe the only game for me? — where hearing the opening notes of any of five or six songs is instant tearing It is a very, very special game bsky.app/profile/maxn...

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Some of you may be tired of hearing me repeat this, but nobody gets to complain unless they’ve listened to me and gone and played it xD

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

OPUS: Echo of Starsong had me crying harder than I’ve done for ANY other piece of media. And not necessarily in a bad way. Y’all gotta play it!

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Reposted by Max Nichols

Nimasprout 🔜 LBX @nimasprout.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Terrible photo but jazzed about how the varnish brought everything together on this wave painting. Will take proper photos and list it tomorrow 🌊

Artist holding oval wave painting. Acryla gouache and color pencils

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Oh iiiinteresting. I'll have to give these a listen, thanks for the heads up!

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Oh! You had Old Smudged Map, too! That was literally my second choice, I was agonizing over that one or this one

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

As amazing as this track is there are so many other amazing options too, what are the odds, hahah

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

#OSTober 8: Fav cover of game music I'm gonna cheat a little bit and pick a song that was redone, better, in a sequel. That counts as a cover right? Revelation (NEO Mix), from NEO: The World Ends With You (the whole soundtrack is incredible) www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HgB...

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7.31 - リベレイション (Revelation - JP) -NEO MIX- | NEO: The World Ends with You Soundtrack

YouTube video by HemborgerChariot's Upload Mess

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I think it’s important to know what percentage of the bullet needs to be silver. They put gold leaf in cheap alcohol after all 🤔

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I prefer light mode if I am in a well-lit room In that situation, bright text on dark backgrounds is more straining for me.

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Looking good! I'm gonna stop by and say hi -- I was considering bringing some of my books for you to sign but I dunno, that's a lot of tonnage, hahah

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

These are very good questions I see there is a reply but it’s from someone I’ve got blocked so i probably wouldn’t take it at face value even if I could see it

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

“Strange Scaffold’s distinctive creative lens” yeesh. Barely pretending now, huh. Not all stories are mine to tell but uhh I am highly skeptical about all of this and the uncritical positive framing in all coverage of this studio

“Meanwhile, Strange Scaffold is spearheading an initative called Project Share, which encourages developers to share the original code for their games so other studios can riff on it. This previously helped enable the development of another Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion game and has now saved an Artificer game from cancellation.
The press release explains that Gods with Badges took the work already completed by Artificer and reinterpreted it "through Strange Scaffold's distinctive creative lens." Studio Head Xalavier
Nelson Jr. added that he is "deeply grateful to the original developers at Artificer for trusting us with their project, and can't wait for people to see what we've built on this complex, exciting foundation."”

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

#OSTober 8: Hub/Overworld Theme The hardest so far. Even after excluding airship themes, UI map menus, & popular options. I'll go with 2nd World Map Theme from Golden Sun: The Lost Age. I haven't played the game in almost 25 years but I REALLY remember this track. www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4ms...

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Golden Sun 2 "2nd World Map Theme" Music Request

YouTube video by Vitsyopkis

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Hahahah I am glad I get to be part of this problem for you xD

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

You should be careful to never streamline players past the fun parts. It is surprising sometimes how easy it is as a game designer to miss what makes our games fun. Even Miyamoto has done it

PEOPLE:
- Shigeru Miyamoto, age 58. Producer of Super Mario 64. Creator of Mario & Zelda.

QUOTE:
Miyamoto: When I was working on Super Mario 64, I realized halfway through that it was getting boring. …

I don't remember if it was when I watched someone playing it, but I was like, "Wait, a minute…" So I went around and asked everyone, "This game was really fun in the beginning, but now it doesn't feel fun anymore, does it?" And just as I'd expected, they all said, "We agree.”

Well, it was something really simple with Mario's movement. In the beginning, we had Mario turning really slowly, so that it was really overemphasized. But at some point he'd started turning really quickly. He kind of zipped around.

So then we changed it so that he went back to turning really slowly.

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Viv is a world-class sandbox/gameplay designer, listen to her (she talks about more generalizable stuff in the subsequent posts)

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Got my cooy of this—such a gorgeous book. Great job @retrogamebooks.com . I had completely forgotten what I’d written for this Zelda 2 blurb, hahah

Photo of a big 2-page spread of the world map from Zelda 2. A quote from me is highlighted:

“Adventure of Link eschewed the intimacy of the first Zelda's Hyrule in favor of an iconic, zoomed-out map. In doing so it gave us the biggest Hyrule in the series, a title it held for 30 years. Zooming out and seeing how the entire world from the first game could fit in a small corner of this one fired the imagination.
This was our first glimpse of Hyrule as a realm, one with castles, towns, a history, and a future. The first Hyrule with people to save. A Hyrule with stories to tell. A more sophisticated Hyrule where you had vanquished evil but now had to grow into the people's hero. Showing that Hyrule was a vibrant place with real stakes was Adventure of Link's enduring gift to the series."

Another photo of a blurb by me, this time sbout Zelda 1. It’s not all visible though, so I canmt write the text here.

Below the blurb is a blank and white drawing of the Zelda 1 map.

Another image of the Zelda 1 map, drawn in a different style. Above are scans from a Japanese guide.

A 2-page spread of panels from a Zelda 2 manga.

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Ah I tried searching for that patent number and couldn't find it, thanks for doing the check

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Basically every single post I see on my feed there would cause me to block the poster if I saw it here on bsky

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

In my case it's type 1 diabetes, so my hypoglycemia can be dangerous. Alarms from my glucose monitor will wake me up in the middle of the night and I'll stumble to the fruit snack stash and eat like 2000 calories of fruit snacks because I'm ravenous and can't think straight, whoops

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

OK this is insanely dystopian, but also lmao (I use fruit snacks to control my low blood sugars)

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The fundamental agony of caring about conservation is that you have to win every battle, forever. They only need to win once

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

On this platform I cannot say what I think the people responsible deserve

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Your generosity is extended also to plants, which means you specifically do not want their habitats going viral for foot traffic. Makes sense to me!

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Something has really gotta give

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

#OSTober 7: Night Theme Let's go with Katamari Stars this time. It's the theme that plays when you're looking at the constellations in the first Katamari Damacy. Soft woodwind melody, gentle beat. I could sleep to this one. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zBb...

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カタマリ★スターズ

YouTube video by Katamari Damacy Series SOUND TEAM - Topic

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I don't even have kids and the idea of my kid going through that with a teacher fills me with an incandescent rage

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I hope you manage to knock some sense into them. I have to assume these are mostly people passing on their own trauma; maybe it's possible to get through to them.

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

argh there are so many of those art teachers and they leave a trail of fucking BODIES in their wake. They are artist-killers. Kids leave their classes with their dreams & artistic desire annihilated. Some of the most monstrous people on earth. Destroying someone's artistic impulse is a moral crime

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

#OSTober 6: Town/City Theme This could be either Tristram (Diablo) or Time Circuits (Chrono Trigger), but I want to celebrate NEW stuff! I'll pick Saka No Machi by @joelcorelitz.bsky.social, the theme of New Dam City in Eastward. A busy, jazzy delight; you linger outside so the music doesn't stop!

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Saka No Machi

YouTube video by Joel Corelitz - Topic

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I appreciate you, and I'm sorry you have to worry about this shit

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

And I keep linking to this, hahah, but it keeps being relevant-- I think skill portability is also a big part of this equation, and part of whether a platform can or cannot successfully carve out a niche for itself: bsky.app/profile/maxn...

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I think there's a nugget of something here. A path to a future where markets and audiences are more segmented into groups or categories by platforms that do curation, with niches more strongly carved out by this combination of platform intentionality and building games for specific platforms.

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Modern huge platforms have largely abandoned this kind of curation: they've all adopted "throw the doors open wide and let anyone in" as their tactic. As a side effect your competion becomes "everyone on earth". By doing this platform holders no longer offer a curated audience to game makers.

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Instead of "getting on Steam" being functionally free and the problem being "standing out", the hard part is getting on the platform. Once you're there standing out is easier because there is a smaller audience that is already known to have the right taste.

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Max Nichols @maxnichols.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A platform that has a curated set of games is able to provide, to game makers, a curated _audience_ in turn. If you release your game in a platform that has already pre-filtered its audience to people who enjoy the kinds of games on that platform, then it shifts the burden--

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