iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I sincerely hope for a day when “update” in the tech space isn’t such a scary word. It’s almost impressive how frequently changes are made for-the-worse on every platform/storefront.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 19h

Another “proud of myself” update from today: Art team asked for a way to produce high quality, transparent images of characters mid-animation. So now if dev-cheats are enabled, there’s a menu on the pause screen to make them! Supports zoom, pan, & mirror. Great for button making. ~200 lines of code.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 19h

Much appreciated! Among so many other reasons to avoid The Sloppening, we *enjoy* making games. Of all the things you could outsource, why creativity? Why passion? Throwing out humanity to make a quick buck was wrong BEFORE ai and all ai does is accelerate that mistake.

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Reposted by Podunk Games

BostonFIG @bostonfig.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Know before you go: BostonFIG is THIS SATURDAY at 10am! At the @bostonarts.org Cyclorama, 539 Tremont St. Nearest T stops: Back Bay (Orange) and Tufts Medical Center (Orange), plus Silver Line along Washington St. (Parking is available but limited!) Tickets at the door or at bostonfig.com.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 22/09/2026

Pretty proud of the way I built the new settings menu for Mountains & Molehills. The way the settings page saves and updates makes it pretty easy for the rest of the game to alter itself around the settings. I’m using it now to implement a “reduced motion” mode for accessibility

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 22/09/2026

You’d think that FREQUENTLY mentioning that we are an ZERO-AI studio would be a big enough hint, but never underestimate how dense tech grifters can be. 🙄 Silly me missing out on $5000 in slop store credit though

Lengthy email from a youtuber trying to offer a sponsorship for their “AI game engine.”

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 20/09/2026

Genuinely hope you feel as proud of yourself as you should! Looks great, huge improvement!

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 20/09/2026

Happy for you, it’s nice when the cheapest, fun, most moral, and relatively low effort options all align like that, though I feel like the rarity of such options is intentionally overstated.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 20/09/2026

I’ve seen a few light switches outside of bathroom here in the US, and it’s always jarring. Including the one in my house lol.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 20/09/2026

I truly love the ambitious push to better your game when you have a live showcase coming up, but I gotta say I never realized how difficult it is to regularly market online during that crunch period for a small studio. I want to make videos and posts but I also have 10,000 lines of code to write 🫨

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 20/09/2026

For some games, that makes the ONLY remaining part of the save being location. Like in a linear platformer, if you heal and save, the save file might legitimately just be “location: level 2, mid-stage” or something!

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 19/09/2026

Channeling my inner SpongeBob lol

Badly edited final panel of the comic, duplicated so the launch results in a cartoonish explosion reminiscent of Spongbob.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 18/09/2026

…f…un? Never heard of it. Gotta see where this entry falls on The Timeline, theorycraft some way that the main character was dead the whole time, and see how many updoots I get if I call it ‘mid’

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 18/09/2026

Confirmed real. My nintendo works at dad

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 18/09/2026

The brief clip of the bazaar shopkeeper gives me hope for all the mini game runners. Seems like they’re giving every character a broader animation set.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 12/09/2026

Maybe this is overly-optimistic, but part of me hopes that the closer these slop bots encroach on tech-bro-adjacent spaces, the more of them will wake up to it being a plague.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 12/09/2026

Suggestion for fellow game devs: If you plan on making your own sounds, consider getting a Zoom H1 handy recorder. It’s probably the best possible quality-to-price ratio mic you can get for sound effects. #NotSponsored lol

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 11/09/2026

Cursed. I know ‘mobile platforms’ and ‘consistency’ are antonyms but sometimes it feels actively malicious 😅

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 11/09/2026

Oh lord are they a perfect square?! I always just assumed they would be smart enough to make the aspect ratio match their flagship tablets so app makers aren’t sent to the torture chamber for 11 hundred years

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 11/09/2026

Looks like my invite to slop&theft-con finally arrived. 🙄 Podunk Games is a strictly zero-ai studio, and that isn’t changing.

A spam email from “Devin”, who has been sending the same email to every developer on the planet for their garbage “AI gaming conference”

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 10/09/2026

They’re also remarkably consistent about adding disclaimers to any parts that AREN’T gameplay, even labeling “effects added” or the rare “In-Engine unlocked camera.” It’s probably a legal-team requirement, sure, but nobody else seems to be this consistent.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 10/09/2026

Yeah, it’s disgusting how often it’s pitched as a “friend” or “therapist” too. When I’ve been unfortunate enough to have conversations with people that fully bought the hivemind bait, it’s scary to think how easily the tech oligarchs could make it subtly lean toward their preferred belief system. 🫠

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 10/09/2026

I was messing around with shaders for the revamped Picnic Mouse shop and accidentally made the mouse ace.

Shop screen for a mouse with a little farm stand. The wavy, procedural backdrop resembles the colors of the asexual pride flag.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 08/09/2026

100% agree. My sister put it really nicely a few minutes ago: “I never would’ve guessed child and adult link are from the same iteration”

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 08/09/2026

I don’t love the extremely heavy-handed post-processing, but it’s not really brushed-on, imo. It’s very much rebuilt and looks to have a lot added too. Would all these editions feel more charming in the original art style though? Absolutely

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 08/09/2026

This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life

Amiibo for the latest Ocarina of Time remake allow you to superimpose the Nintendo64 faces of both link and Zelda onto the new link model.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 06/09/2026

Works with YouTube tutorials and devlogs too! I’d go as far as to say that anyone who leaves the windows default copilot-on-the-taskbar needs to learn why that should viscerally disgust them to have.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 05/09/2026

Nice! We too are a fully anti-AI studio!

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 05/09/2026

Heck yeah! We both learned something today. I’ll absolutely be using this myself in the future, thanks!

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 05/09/2026

Ah okay. I’ll let you know if I have a more concrete answer later. I’m pretty sure I ran into something very similar recently. The only other piece of info I found is that theres an experimental resource called DPITexture that’s meant for scaling+rasterizing SVGs, but it’s not very well documented.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 05/09/2026

I want to say I used a Panel Container with a StyleBoxTexture (instead of the ninepatch node) and I ***think*** one of those margin settings in the StyleBoxTexture resource allows for finer control over the scale of each slice.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 05/09/2026

Aaaagh I know I figured out a fix for that issue, but it’s not coming to mind right now and I’m away from my computer. I’ll try to remember to reply here when I’m home. It’s really frustrating for sure.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 05/09/2026

That last part would be a fantastic feature proposal.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 04/09/2026

If I could go back in time to set myself on the right path, I’d probably have given myself a link to shadertoy. Messing around in that lately and setting out to make something as a puzzle has MASSIVELY helped me with my problem solving and math skills. Plus it’s not python lol

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 04/09/2026

In a classroom setting, I think this is great advice. Learning on your own though, this would be tough. Only because decent pseudocode requires a baseline knowledge of logical operations. Although flow-chart pseudocode can definitely bridge the gap!

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 03/09/2026

Cards?! In our #deckbuilding #roguelike?! 🤔🤔 It’s more likely than you think!

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 03/09/2026

That’s what the GPT stands for. Get Potato Thoup

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 01/09/2026

Absolutely! Now and forever: “Why should I bother to play/read/watch/enjoy something nobody could be bothered to make?” Programming is a form of making. Perhaps debatably, I’d consider it authoring like any other writing.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 01/09/2026

As our project gets bigger and bigger, we’ve added custom icons and tooling! Here’s a mini tutorial on how to add custom editor icons to nodes in #Godot! #gamedev #gamedesign #indiegame #indiedev

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 30/08/2026

Nice! Hope those same devs days get to come sooner than later.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 30/08/2026

Oh I see. Hopefully they don’t make you wait forever! Definitely try to find some offline-contributions you can make to the game. Like when I’m at my “real job” I take notes on all sorts of stuff for the game so I keep it at the forefront of my mind and be ready to focus when the work week ends!

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 30/08/2026

Did you end up finding the root cause of the PC breaking down, or are you disassembling/reassembling to see if it sorts itself out?

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 30/08/2026

Fair, I’ve definitely met my fair share of FIFA+COD+GTA folks. In my mind, I was counting them as return customers, but you’re right. That’s not some massive boon consumer for Sony on its own.

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 30/08/2026

I hope you’re able to get it resolved! I’ve always had so much trouble getting back in the swing of things when I’m gone that long from a project. 😞

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 30/08/2026

Agreed. Even exploration sandbox games almost always include a setting to disable item loss on death (ie. Classic (formerly softcore) in terraria, gamerule keepInventory in Minecraft, etc.) to prevent this monotonous “mechanic”

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Podunk Games @podunkgames.com · 30/08/2026

Don’t get me wrong, I’m praying on their downfall, but sunk-cost will absolutely cause the new console owners to buy more. I think that’s a large driving factor to the sales of Switch2-editions for Nintendo as well. “I paid for the new hardware I may as well see what it can do!”

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