iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Metkis @metkis.com · 12/05/2026

After weeks of emailing support and eventually sending my old PDU-01 unit to @panic.com’s god-tier employee, Dave, I finally got it back updated to a usable firmware. It took flashing some new WiFi drivers to finally bring my PlayDate back to development-capable, but it’s there now. So happy.

A playdate handheld sitting on a MacBook keyboard.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 11/05/2026

Favorite part of Lenin’s wiki is this little detail where he apparently kept photos of Marx and Engels and tells people privately not that he “loves them” but that he’s *in love* with them. It’s beautiful stuff.

Lenin developed an "emotional attachment" to his ideological heroes, such as Marx, Engels, and Cherny hevsky; he owned
portraits of them, 4701 and privately described himself as being "in love" with Marx and Engels. According to Lenin biographer James D. White, Lenin treated their writings as "holy writ", a "religious dogma"

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Metkis @metkis.com · 06/05/2026

This 1-bit city builder called Glagstone looks super crunchy and lovely. Check it out: store.steampowered.com/app/4198840/...

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Metkis @metkis.com · 20/11/2025

Silly dedication in the book, The Haar.

For my gran
You would not have liked this book at all.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 07/10/2025

Ssome more tiles I created just learning Pixen; I'm not a great pixel artist so this is mostly practice. #gamedev #pixelart

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Metkis @metkis.com · 07/10/2025

Designed a little tileset to learn Godot's TileMapLayers

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Metkis @metkis.com · 29/09/2025

I’ll add there’s a wiki just for Alaska’s notoriously bad crime rate, per capita. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_i...

Crime rates
As of the latest data available, Alaska has one of the highest crime rates per capita in the United States, particularly in the categories of violent crime and property crime. The state often tops the charts for rates of sexual assault, domestic violence, and suicide.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 08/09/2025

It’s such a boring choice, but when I need a good workhorse, it’s Fira Code. It has excellent ligature support and is just a pleasant coding typeface.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 27/08/2025

I don’t fully comprehend the burst mechanic in Lumines Arise, but I did crack 1 mil score on the demo levels only to be destroyed in multiplayer by some absolutely inhuman player. It’s pure flow-state gameplay, but the effects are too much sometimes. Runs okay on SteamDeck.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 21/08/2025

Super excited for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, but this part of the Variety article is sort of hilarious. "He just wants that mama's milk."

But this is also the most Freudian interpretation of Shelley’s “Frankenstein” yet. When not railing against religion and social conventions, Victor is constantly nursing a glass of milk. Goth’s character may be off-screen, but she isn’t far.

“Guillermo would always be like, ‘He wants that lechita,’” Isaac says. “When everything goes wrong, he just wants that mama’s milk.” (To drive the point home, Goth plays both Victor’s mother and Elizabeth, the woman he falls in love with who happens to be betrothed to his brother.)

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Metkis @metkis.com · 19/08/2025

Anyone remember early ML-aided art generators that had you scribble a cat or whatever, and they would spit out something incredibly strange, often with multiple faces and eyes as if H. R. Giger drew demonic stereograms on acid? Now that was good stuff.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 09/08/2025

Bought an old desk for a pittance and been out refinishing it because why not, here’s the before and after sanding it and now w/three coats of satin poly. Final coat still drying. Pretty sure it’s Douglas Fir or Pine.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 06/08/2025

I saw one in an art museum! They’re not *too* expensive, but definitely a splurge. The Panasonic/Muji SL-PH7 is also rad. The same designer of the wall-mounted CD player, Naoto Fukasawa, also worked under the brand Plus Minus Zero. They even made a sort of cool minimalist, single-slice toaster.

Toaster, 2007
Naoto Fukasawa, designer
Japanese, born 1956
Plus Minus Zero Co. Ltd., maker
polypropylene and metal

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Metkis @metkis.com · 06/08/2025

I love the way these trees are art-ed for Mother 3. They layer well together and have a lot of individual identity alongside tastefully outlined details and shading.

Mother 3 screenshot containing player and NPCs inside a swamp with pink trees.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 08/06/2025

Like how this mockup turned out, especially how the little cross for the hospital in the UI swings around. UI is fun to animate even if it's a pain sometimes.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 08/06/2025

Another 2.5D Pixel-Art Mockup. I remember folks did not like the wobbly text box, but I wanted to show it had depth.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 08/06/2025

Spoilers, this was already in color before. This was actually for my defunct game, Morning Star. But a robot that thinks it's a noir detective is always a fun premise.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 08/06/2025

Cybernoir should be more of a thing.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 08/06/2025

I used to like finding cool tile sets and working them into something 3D, this was one of my later attempts with some basic stylized water and realtime reflections.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 08/06/2025

Old but good mecha concept pixel art + 3D. I really like how this one turned out and it was my first time working with a strong back light. This one uses reverse hull method, I think.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 05/06/2025

You: It can’t be that bad, Metkis. Russian cursive:

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Metkis @metkis.com · 30/04/2025

I am able to get something vaguely similar (see below), but the effect is too inconsistent, where yours is sharp and consistent on different types of models. Anyways, if you have any pointers I would appreciate them.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 30/04/2025

This is kind of what I've got and it gets close, but I'm curious what I might be missing, like how to boost only the additive part of the effect. I'm not a graphics programmer, so I feel I'm missing how to just get the additive portion of the fresnel to show, while still considering the lighting.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 23/04/2025

Added a house, inspired by Animal Crossing. Sort of playing at using a character instead of entirely mouse-based gameplay, so navigating your garden is significant and building out your island has more purpose. Possibly acts as a place to rest? Might scrap, but it *is* fun lookin'. #gamedev

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Metkis @metkis.com · 22/04/2025

Super cheap rolling clouds/fog using a single plane. This was fun to work through. Followed alongside the ShaderGraph implementation by @cyanilux.bsky.social with some minor changes. Needs slightly more tweaking for my use-case, but I enjoy how simple and effective this method is. #gamedev

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Metkis @metkis.com · 21/04/2025

Well, this is definitely randomly generated, but maybe too randomly generated. #gamedev

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Metkis @metkis.com · 20/04/2025

Touched grass, it went *okay*.

I don’t know what this yellow-flowered bush is.

This tree is so pretty when it blooms and often smells like semen.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 13/04/2025

Implemented some plainly designed and animated dialogue boxes. I enjoy working on UI/UX (we do exist!) even if I'm not quite far enough on the mechanics end to spend time on bespoke animations or more thematic details quite yet. It's cool to take a break from the more system-oriented stuff. #gamedev

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Metkis @metkis.com · 12/04/2025

Okay, now we can do some fun lerps across the entire tile range without much effort and it's cute as hell. This is the fun stuff. #gamedev

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Metkis @metkis.com · 12/04/2025

I also took the time to add clouds and mess around with textures + models more. Still thinking I should make the game more strange to stand out, but at this point it's kind of just a comfortable project to chip away at.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 12/04/2025

Sweet. I now have blocks properly stored in a 2D array/grid and even accessible via Inspector. I can do generation of much bigger patches of land with this now, but at the time I'm also able to organize existing tiles by location. Cool.

A 2D array of GameObjects displayed in Unity's inspector with all positions filled.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 11/04/2025

Moved over to ACES color-grading and made some tweaks to the material shader to use world-based coordinates so the tiles are more dissimilar. Tweaked the shadow cascades for more performant and cleaner shadows. Tweaked the plant model. Added some bloom, might pull it back.

A screenshot of a WIP game of 3D cubes on a plane. Each of the cubes represents different terrain types (water, stone, dirt, and grass) and some are topped with decorations that look like plants of different color.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 10/04/2025

I added some water blocks, changed the weeds/grass into a model, gave them semi-random colors, and It's all giving kind of LEGO-like now? I don't know, I'm about to move onto another burner project and think about the gameplay more.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 10/04/2025

I don't like how it looks, but it does look better with the saturation pushed. Torn whether to make the plants "alien" and just get wild with colors and such.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 10/04/2025

I worked away from tiles to cube meshes using a temporary tri-planar shader, wrote a system for handling tile's containing objects like grass, and got the very basics of watering soil in. Still deciding if I want a player-character or not. Kind of giving a Dragon Quest Builders vibe now. #gamedev

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Metkis @metkis.com · 09/04/2025

I did not move plots onto an array, but did program the shovel's logic, added a screen-shake listener, combined some scripts, created singleton controllers, and expanded the tiling logic. Gonna see if the main gameplay loop can be fun before I move onto systems or graphics. #gamedev

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Metkis @metkis.com · 07/04/2025

I've got zooming, camera movement, a basic grid, and simple superficial tool selection in, that's enough for today. Everything is temp art, I want it to look either more playful or cerebral when we get going. #gamedev

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Metkis @metkis.com · 05/04/2025

Getting lost playing the PSOne game Severed (1999) that the TV show is based on, or possibly wasting a lot of time in Unity3D for a post?

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Metkis @metkis.com · 28/03/2025

Late to this party, but finally finished Spider-Man Remastered. What a lovingly made game. Combat is super fun, and I liked this version of Peter Parker by the end. Stealth sections sucked, but most do, so... otherwise not a lot to complain about. Great time.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 07/03/2025

Rendering flowers in a fun way to give them a sense of dimension while still stylized a bit. #gamedev

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Metkis @metkis.com · 07/03/2025

You can actually use a repeating B&W cloud texture on a directional light's cookie input in Unity for quick and dirty cloud shadows or tree cover. With a script on your directional light you can also offset it over time, like below. #gamedev Script: pastebin.com/BxvPCDZW

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Metkis @metkis.com · 04/03/2025

People say realistic graphics don’t age well, but this game is still gorgeous ~8 years later, and the great thing about being so behind on actually playing games is that these are hardly spoilers.

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Metkis @metkis.com · 04/03/2025

I took a break from Avowed to finish Horizon: Zero Dawn, which I had left close to complete for a while. Last couple hours are fun! A remarkably polished game for a new IP, and the combat still feels great. Story isn’t even bad, as far as “you’re the special baby that saves the world” tropes go.

Ending of Horizon: Zero Dawn (prior to credits and after-credits scene)

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Metkis @metkis.com · 13/02/2025

Fantastic news, my @loish.bsky.social calendar came, and it looks gorgeous.

A calendar with a figure looking at her reflection in water with the year 2025 printed more darkly across two lines and with a glossy finish.

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