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Nearly Tobias

@nearlytobias.bsky.social
142 followers 564 following 935 posts

computer game dev, synthesizer gremlin, perpetual tinkerer Cymro yn Awstralia

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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
ten days of blue kinda morning. what a record.
john beltran - ten days of blue (Peacefrog, 1996)
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
mate reached out to see if i was doing ok, which was appreciated but out of the blue! turns out anytime they log on to Steam, i seem to be playing CS2... had to explain i've been leaving Hammer 5 open for hours on end to compare mesh operations with a gdextension level editor im building for Godot 🫠
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
bad insomnia recently so I'm getting stuck in on another PsychOdyssey rewatch. hard to find the words to describe how essential this documentary is. a towering monument to the power of collaboration and the creative process. a deep well of inspiration every time
youtube.com
Double Fine PsychOdyssey - YouTube
2 Player Productions and Double Fine Productions present Double Fine PsychOdyssey, an unprecedented documentary experience seven years in the making. Ten yea...
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
incredible textures here if you need a little quake grunge in your life
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Game Maker's Toolkit @gamemakerstoolkit.com · 27/07/2026
Well, it finally happened! After 9 years of Unity dominance, Godot was the most used game engine for GMTK Game Jam 2026 submissions. 🤖 Godot - 47% 🎮 Unity - 34% 🛠️GameMaker - 5% 🚀 Unreal Engine - 3% ✨ Other - 11%
Pie chart showing game engines used to create 10,511 GMTK Game Jam games in 2026. Godot has the largest slice with 47%. Then Unity with 34%. Other with 11%. Game Maker with 5%. And Unreal Engine with 3%.
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
'Everyone has got a plan, until they get punched in the mouth' - Mike Tyson on game design documents
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
children queue for a service desk in a drab white wash nursery. those at the front babble in to a microphone. behind glass a faceless machine connected to a CNC crayon plotter rapidly draws a perfect house and stamps the child's name in the corner. the sheet ejects from a slot. next! #genai #art
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
always exciting to see what Fumito Ueda + team are cooking up
youtube.com
gen ATLAS Reveal Trailer | Summer Game Fest 2026 [English Version]
YouTube video by genDESIGN
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Just got round to listening to the new Boards album. As haunting as it is beautiful, no one else does it quite like this. Well worth the wait.
Boards Of Canada - Inferno LP
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
concentration of real insight in the game dev tutorial ecosystem is practically homeopathic. you'll see the same handful of points lifted from a GDC talk given 10 years ago, repeated ad nauseum by an endless string of channels who clearly didn't glean said insights from doing the work themselves
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Fidel Destro @fideldestro.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
The is GaleriaLux, the most modern art gallery in the world, and a passion project I created during the month of May. It currently features 13 unique rooms and 56 exhibits, which can be wandered randomly forever. #Godot #GameDev #SoloDev #Blender #Art
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
the worst thing about finding decent third party replacements for core Windows functionality is that the whole OS is built to resist and reject organ transplants, so you'll never get full coverage. the 15% of the time Explorer sluggishly pops open instead of FilePilot is just enough to be maddening
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
David Lynch once ended a positive fan interaction with: "Thank you, and remember, the universe is in your basement." I think about it quite a lot
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
This is beautiful and just what I needed this morning. I love people who get a brain worm and then just go do the damn thing. Go make some weird shit, no one can stop ya!
youtu.be
OK Computer but everything is my voice
YouTube video by shonkywonkydonkey
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Haven't seen Backrooms yet but I can say the following about Chiwetel Ejiofor being lost in an infinite labyrinth: go listen to the Piranessi audiobook. It's a great book but his voice really takes this thing to another level. The word 'vestibule' will never sound the same again.
Susanna Clarke Piranesi audiobook cover
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Lee Petty @leepetty.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
Fly through of part of a Keeper level directly in the Unreal Engine editor. Part way through I turn on all of the game objects the player doesn't see -- it takes a lot to make games work.
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Voxy @voxy.space · 26/05/2026
v1.0.0 of @icons, my icon library for #Godot developers, is now OUT! 🎉 🔣 400 icons designed to fit with the default editor icons ; 🎨 available in all 4 node colors (default, 2D, 3D, and control) ; ⚖️ free & open source! (MIT license) i hope they'll be useful to you! :) github.com/Voxybuns/at-...
github.com
GitHub - Voxybuns/at-icons: Open source icons for custom Godot nodes
Open source icons for custom Godot nodes. Contribute to Voxybuns/at-icons development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Watched this last night. Really enjoyable Ukrainian sci-fi drama that is stripped back and focused but with some stunning space visuals. A nice tonic to Project Hail Mary which was a fun blockbuster but way too glossy and jubilant for my personal tastes.
boxd.it
U Are the Universe (2024)
After the explosion of the Earth, the Ukrainian space trucker Andriy becomes the only human in the Universe until French woman Catherine calls him from the faraway space station. Andriy decides to see...
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Free your ass ... and your mind will follow
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Picked up LUMINES REMASTERED to play on Steam Deck and it's got me good. Kinda game you can feel rewiring your brain in realtime. Woke up with this absolute bop lodged in there and now I feel like I can do anything
youtu.be
Lumines: Mondo Grosso - SHAKE YA BODY (live)
YouTube video by Tomnuki
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
im sure you know it already but this just reminded me of that incredible recording of him tearing apart the shite script for an ad he's doing. Gotta respect his dogged refusal to phone it in, even for a frozen pea ad. everyone should give this much of a shit when making something or why even bother
youtu.be
Orson Welles | Frozen Peas Animated
YouTube video by Dr Moon Rat
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Finding reliable info online pre-LLMs was already like finding a needle in a haystack. Now it's like finding a piece of hay in a needle stack. Even more difficult and there are way more pricks to avoid.
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
So you're telling me tech artists have just been stashing secret hoards of data into every vertex color, UV channel, and pixel they can get their grubby hands on for decades? Right under our noses? #GameDev
Frodo: All right, then. Keep your secrets.
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
the state of tech journalism is more dire than it's ever been. 10 functionally identical articles across 10 different outlets, saying absolutely nothing at all, based on the same vague whisperings of nothingness posted elsewhere. a single mote of dust producing 100 cascading ripples on a lake of rot
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
my face on discovering how stately + complex you can make vertex animations when you have a combo of baked projection maps, vertex color ids and all the channels of a RGBAF texture to play with at runtime I just fell down a very deep rabbit hole and I love it! #Godot #GodotEngine #Blender #GameDev
media.tenor.com
a cat with big eyes is looking at a person holding a toothbrush in front of its face .
Alt: a cat with wide eyes looking shocked
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
the true inspiration behind Blender's Cell Fracture tool #Blender #Anime #DBZ
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
planet progress: - now using #Blender data transfer modifier to copy unfractured sphere normals on to joined fractured shell mesh - started writing #Godot logic for nested substrates, edge face mat blending, layered ray casts materials need a refresh but they'll do for now #GodotEngine #GameDev
blue and white dithered planet hanging in ascii star field, with golden atmosphere glow and particlesdithered blue and white planet hanging in ascii star field, with exposed chunks of shell damage revealing several substrate layers (red, stone) and an unbroken golden yellow interior (like an egg yolk)
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Added cell IDs to vertex colors in #Blender for more granular cell selection. Still a single mesh instance but I've added a sphere collider and use dot products to identify cells. State is stored in a small texture sampled by the shader, so per-cell animations run on the GPU. #GameDev #GodotEngine
dithered blue planet in ascii starfield, missing a few outer shell chunks. with a single chunk of the outer shell highlighted in white.dithered blue planet in ascii starfield, missing a few outer shell chunks. with a single chunk of the outer shell highlighted in white. visible within 3d bounding box for the underlying sphere collider in Godot.
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Making some good progress on my planet destruction system. I'm making nested shells, cell fracturing, baking data to UVs, then rejoining to a single mesh in #Blender. I can then drive destruction from a vertex shader in #Godot with a single mesh instance. #GameDev #GodotEngine
a single dithered blue planet in a debug bounding boxfractured chunks of dithered blue planet, exploded out beyond debug bounding boxchunks of exploding dithered blue planet, surround a glowing red dithered inner layer, hanging in a black space with ascii stars
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Trying to be better at sharing work, so here's a few screenshots of my main #Godot project - a 3D 'incremental' space mining game, inspired by countless hours of Tetris Effect & Lumines Arise. Having a lot of fun experimenting with different techniques and fine tuning the art style. Steam page soon!
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
I had a weird dream that my Dad (retired, not involved in games at all) was making a walking sim and was insistent on placing every blade of grass himself. The grass did look pretty great tbf but I woke up before we ran any benchmarks. Maybe next time...
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
Whether you intend it or not, every game is ultimately about space: world space, clip space, screen space, view space, ad space, disk space, press space. Carl Sagan would have something good to say about this. #gamedev
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
Good moment to remind people that Star Fox only exists because Nintendo gave money to some pioneering British teenagers who impressed their engineers by circumventing the copyright protections on the Game Boy. If this happened today, they'd be sued into oblivion instead... #starfox #nintendo
eurogamer.net
Born slippy: the making of Star Fox
Every Sunday we take a stroll through our archives in order to reintroduce to a piece from our past. Today, in the wake…
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
Oh hey, it's that time of year when I get domain renewal notifications for a handful of URLs I bought in a hyperfocus vortex years ago and never did anything with!
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
New FM groovebox ROM from Ess (main designer behind Fors plugins and a few classic Elektron boxes) for the GBA. Runs on the hardware or a decent emulator. This looks incredible!
youtu.be
FMS – handheld FM groovebox for GBA [Lo-Bit Club]
YouTube video by Fors
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
I want this for you all #gamedev #indiedev #godot
A screenshot of David Lynch (white hair, white beard and wearing black sunglasses indoors) on a video call.

Below him is the subtitle 'I hope you all are having a lot of fun working on your favourite projects'
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Just had a very Lynchian dental check-up. The dentist kept asking my opinion on the Premier League while my mouth had one of those suction tubes in it - and the entire time, a particularly dispassionate piano cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s 'Espresso' was playing on a loop.
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Hokum, it's a good time! I'm not the biggest fan of horror that leans heavy on the jump scares but these are well earned and deftly balanced with some genuinely funny moments. The Irish folklore felt quite peripheral to me, which is a shame, but I enjoyed it alot overall. Well worth a watch. #film
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Sometimes you get to be a helpful NPC in someone's lifelong quest to identify a mislabelled Radiohead download from Napster. Isn't that what the internet is all about?
Screenshot of Bluesky exchange in a thread about mislabelled Napster downloads:

Tree (8months ago)
"The face you went with Phish over The Gourds makes me miss the randomness of Napster (and ages us). I've spent my life trying to figure out what song 'Hunting Bears - Radiohead' actually was

Nearly Tobias (3hours ago)
"This one did the rounds labelled as 'Hunting Bears' before Radiohead's Amnesiac album was properly released...is this it?" with embeded video for Phoenix - Embuscade (from their 2000 debut album)

Tree (3hours ago)
"Unbelievable - this is it!"
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
I love the diversity of sources you'll encounter while researching something technical in game dev. While researching a few Blender bits, the most relevant info for my current goal actually came from a dentistry website and a cellular biology website. My game is about space! #gamedev #indiedev
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
And on and on...
science.nasa.gov
Slime Mold Simulations Used to Map Dark Matter Holding Universe Together - NASA Science
The behavior of one of nature's humblest creatures is helping astronomers probe the largest structures in the universe.
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
I recently gained a not insignificant amount of frames on a test scene just cleaning out my laptop's fans. I swear it hasn't been that long since I last did this. Melbourne, why are you so dusty?
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
Hiroshi Yoshimura kinda morning
youtu.be
Hiroshi Yoshimura "GREEN" (1986)
YouTube video by Cosmic Pickle
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
The amount of outlets fanning those flames is pretty depressing. It's a problem in cinema too, you'll see people gleefully comparing box office numbers for films they've not even bothered to go see. Playing top trumps with industry metrics instead of engaging with the art and how it makes them feel.
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
GDExtensions getting their own dedicated tab in #Godot 4.7 is a great update. Regular plugin management is arguably one of the UX areas where there is most room for improvement in Godot, so I hope this leads on to some positive QoL changes on that side of things too.
Godot 4.7's new GDExtension tab with the Utopia Rise Fmod GDExtension installed
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
So impressed with the optimizations a handful of N64 sickos are managing to squeeze out of original hardware. Seems like every 6 months there's another really cool tech demo pushing the boundaries a little further #N64
youtu.be
How I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64
YouTube video by James Lambert
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Ok I couldn't resist going back in. Gave it another spin on a clean git branch, but this time I also reset all non-standard rendering settings, before clearing the .godot cache again. Issue solved! #godot
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
this is also what my last PC build's motherboard looked like after I accidentally ordered a CPU cooler so large that it blocked the first PCI lane
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Godot 4.7 has so many nice QOL features, but performance in my primary project has tanked on the beta1 release. I've cleared the .godot cache, made sure HDR is off and disabled all world env settings. Going to roll back for now but may poke around the profiler later to see if I can find a cause.
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Nearly Tobias @nearlytobias.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Got woken up at 3am by my partner screaming, bolt upright next to me, in the throes of a nightmare which she can now barely remember. Who needs a morning coffee, when you can instead be awoken by a flood of primal fear and cortisol in the witching hour?
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