iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

You post about your game in a reply to a famous person _one_ time (full disclosure, the peak of that graph is uh... six plays)

A activity graph from itch.io. on the left are three days showing a flat zero. on the right is a mighty peak, although it only actually represents about 8 plays over two days

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 27/09/2026

This is a little bit about the effect they had on me, and a little bit about the effect they had on my desire to make games, and belief about what a good game could be

Image showing text The 9 games that shaped me: followed by the covers of these games
Uniracers
Little nemo dream master
Outer wilds
Xcom ufo defense
Planescape torment
Dungeon keeper
Speedrunners
Secret of mana
Blue prince

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 01/09/2026

Post something random or you’ll have an awful September

Klingon (I forget the name) peering into a small hole saying:
Hello?
Is anyone there?
I seek glory!

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 11/08/2026

Finally did some more work on Lunch Rush NES, I added a random function, and it uses input from hardware to make it (slightly!) less predictable. See the different pieces after the reset? That! (Ignore the mouse cursor, I can't be arsed to recapture it)

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 03/08/2026

Never mind, magic cards arrived

Photo of a desk with four envelopes on it

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 30/07/2026

I said almost exactly this about an hour before the pictured post - admittedly worded much worse

Discord chat crop, showing the following:

09:17 J: honestly, I'm surprised about the number of people who say they like him. The genre he inspired has weirdly little in common with the works he actually wrote imo

09:19 J: (excepting blokes with funny names trapsing about the countryside with a wizard)

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 27/07/2026

Aren't you forgetting something?

Controller for the N64 which is, technically, a six button pad

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 27/07/2026

Progress! I realised I had _just_ enough rendering to show gameplay, so I made the first bit of the first gameplay feature: pieces falling and stopping when they land. Seemed more fun than sorting out the rendered palettes :D I will make the pieces fall smoothly, eventually

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 25/07/2026

Wrote the code to feed game state into the draw buffer. It worked, but seemed like I was running out of draw time. After a lot of poking and debugging, it turns out I accidentally turned off the render updating after the first render, and the first render only had partial data for reasons

a view of a nes game showing a board of burger parts. The last column is somewhat glitched, with the left 1/3rd of each item showing a different food to the right 2/3rds

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 20/07/2026

I think that's why the pride promo is this: (but tbh it could have done with some flavour text to make the relationship clearer)

Magic: The Gathering card 'Gilded Lotus'. 5 generic mana to cast, Artifact, rules text reads "Tap: Add three mana of any one color"

The art is a picture of Chandra attaching a gilded lotus flower to Nissa's lapel

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 18/07/2026

I didn't do much, but I got the tiles and palettes for the burger pieces looking acceptable, and I got the background loading from a file Had to change tomatoes to onions because the NES palette is balls. Next: get the board drawn from data in memory - the stationary pieces at least

A screenshot of a nes game I'm working on. There's a 'board' area with elements of a burger stacked up, in three columns. It's surrounded by a frame.

There's a 'score' pane in the top left with a dummy number, and a 'next' pane in the top middle showing the next piece to drop

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 11/07/2026

This is what I've been staring at for an hour or so. Top left is the emulator, and the right 2/3rds is source code (detail in alt text)

A screen split awkwardly. The right 1/3rd has two windows one atop the other. The top is a NES emulator called FCEUX with some debug rendering - burger pieces haphazardly arranged.

The bottom is a console window with me running 'make' over and over and it mostly succeeding.

The right 2/3rds is a window with vim, split into 4 sub windows in 3 columns. The first column is split horizontally, both showing the main.s source file. The top is showing the variables and data types, the bottom showing the current part of the code I'm working on.

Column 2 shows a bunch of variables naming areas in the NES memory space, and helpers for setting control bits in special registers.

The right column shows an include file with useful macros for instructions the cpu lacks. Honestly I copied this from the nesdev wiki because they sounded useful, not because I knew what I needed them for

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 26/06/2026

Well, I guess it makes sense that there's other balloon towns. Also what a design!

Cement mixer balloon. It says Duke City on it, it looks like it's just heating up sat in an air field

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 25/06/2026

There are kits for UK windows with a sort of fabric thing you velcro to the window. I only meant that the in window units I associate with American media literally cannot be fitted into the common uk window style (at home now, so took a picture) without replacing it completely.

A side hinge pvc window, fully open. The hinge side is still touching the frame but 4" in room the edge

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 25/06/2026

Looking at these pictures of some of the weird balloon shapes I think I have a new stupid life goal: pay for a balloon fiesta balloon advert. I don't know what for. A game, I guess

A balloon shaped like an ahoy dips snack pot thing. I wasn't allowed these as a kid because they were too expensive

Various balloons in the shape of:

A can of Guinness
A four pack of fosters
A can of budweiser
A power station cooling tower
A mysterious object labeled unipart

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 25/06/2026

You don't have a favourite balloon? What do you mean they're basically the same. In what world is the Bertie Basset balloon the same as the pint of Guinness balloon? Yes of course they're real, they fly past every year

More balloon fiesta, several balloons and a crowd. But one balloon is a giant Bertie Basset, the sweet mascot made of assets all sorts. It's at least 30m tall and the first time I saw it as a kid I completely lost my shit. I'm not sure if I knew it wasn't made of actual sweets

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 25/06/2026

What do you mean you don't have a yearly light show where the lights are actual hot air balloons? What kind of backwater town is this?

Photo of the balloon glow from the Bristol balloon fiesta. Two rows of hot air balloons (at least a dozen visible) stand in a field in late evening. The sky is not quite full night, but it's a definite night time blue colour. The balloons are brightly lit by the fire of their own... I don't know the term. Torch? The big fire that makes hot air balloons hot.

There's a huge crowd in the foreground, probably several thousand people. The crowd is also visible in the distant background on the far side of the balloons

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 25/06/2026

Couldn't find a photo of a balloon passing it, but I found it with its satellite dishes, and a different local landmark during the yearly balloon festival

Same tower as above, with many additional large satellite dishes

Clifton suspension bridge, with a mass of hot air balloons above it. At least 35. One of them is on the shape of sonic the hedgehog. No really. Another is shaped like a power pilon. There's also the penguin from Wallace and Gromit, a beer can, and a bunny

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 25/06/2026

It used to look much cooler, covered with massive satellite dishes. I always wanted to climb it

Purdown BT tower. Tall concrete thing comprising a central pillar 70m tall, with several cylindrical platforms with gantries, small dishes and mobile telephony equipment. The very top has a spire with a triple aerial thingy

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 04/04/2026

I took this out of the window of my office a few years ago. Such a weird phenomenon in person!

A city skyline, with a cloud front which is completely straight, going from the top right to bottom left in the far distance.

There are admittedly some wispy clouds away from the cloud front

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 19/03/2026

Guy in the game shop tells me he's trying to collect a master set of the TMNT magic set

Meme image of German guy seeing an English guy pretending to be a German guy holding up three fingers wrong.

I dunno I never saw the film, its meaning is 'imposter spotted'

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 15/03/2026

I mentioned a secret project a couple of times: I printed and bound a book of photos of my kids for mother's day. It's a set of pairs of photos of our kids, trying to show off how similar they look. It came out pretty well!

The cover of the book. It has a square aspect ratio. The cover is a watercolour of a rose and two other flowers on a white background. The book has pink cloth covering the spine hinge, and covering the corners

The end papers of the book. It's an attractive pale yellow with a faint pattern of small circles widely spaced out

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 09/03/2026

This game was great! lovely little platformer explorer, it feels like a metroidvania except there's no items or monsters noelcody.itch.io/moss-moss

Final screen of Moss moss, showing a full completion time of 21:18. Text reads

"Fully Mossed!
you really mossed it all
thank you for playing
Game by Noel Cody"

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 24/02/2026

One with that exact effect

Phyrexian Furnace
{1}
Artifact

{T}: Exile the bottom card of target player’s graveyard.

{1}, Sacrifice this artifact: Exile target card from a graveyard. Draw a card.

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 13/02/2026

This is the only spell page so far. This is the real purpose of the book. The idea came from getting annoyed at how much info is missing from the dnd beyond spell list when you print your character sheet. The goal is to include all important numbers and rules, and flavour info to make it feel real

$A page showing two cantrips Fire bolt: includes the symbol for evocation, a symbol for the spell (based on alchemical symbol for combustion). There is a hand, palm up, making a flicking motion. The incantation "Thaaq tharm" is under the image. Mending: includes the symbol for transmutation, and a symbol for the spell (based on the symbol for iron, showing a fracture). There is a drawing of a lodestone and a note that two are needed. A diagram shows a broken pot with two lodestones being rotated around it. The incantation "Scririm jus" accompanies it$

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 13/02/2026

I decided to put in class features the character has yet to unlock, to save me trying to work out and remember the layout to leave enough space. It was a nice excuse to draw more diagrams

A hand written double page showing rules for wizard class features of the school of transmutation.

The transmuters stone rule is accompanied by an image of a patterned rock with transmutation circles carved into it, in a string mesh attached to a long cord loop. There is a (made up) alchemical formula next to it.

Shape hanger is accompanied by a drawing of a crow. Its head is too big but I tried.

Master transmuter is accompanied by four arcane symbols. These are stand ins for the four effects of the spell: transform an object, heal a person, raise dead, and restore youth

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 13/02/2026

I'm planning for the book to act as most of a character sheet. The things that change too frequently to want to keep editing (e.g., proficiency bonus, hp, skills and proficiencies) I'm going to create a miniature character sheet for, and just insert it into the front

A hand written page in a book describing basic dnd wizard mechanics: transcribing spells into the book, and spell casting stats.

It starts with flavour text that reads:

"Primary tuition of wizarding skills should be found in your code text book. Information here is purely to serve A quick reminder when preparing and casting spells"

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 09/02/2026

And finished. Learned a lesson about what to protect from glue, but I'm pretty happy with it!

A small hardback book. It has a burgundy cover, with blue on the spine side. The blue has a pattern of dark blue companion cube looking things.

A marking ribbon is looking out from the bottom

The same book open to the end paper. It's a pattern of flowers on a sage green background. The ribbons will not lie down calmly

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 09/02/2026

This is the finished text block. I added some bookmark ribbons as in likely to want to bookmark multiple pages for quick reference. I'm actually waiting for the final glue up to set for the whole thing, but I forgot to take a wip pic of the cover

A text block sat on a cutting mat.

A text block is a stack of signatures, bound and glued together, but without a cover. (and a signature is a handful of pages stacked and folded in half. This block is incidentally made of four signatures of eight leaves each)

This text pick has a blue fabric with white markings acting as a spine binder. Three red ribbons are poking out from behind it

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 08/02/2026

Due to ongoing horrors (scroll up or down slightly for more info) I decided I needed another hobby. So I'm making a spell book for my 5e Wizard in the campaign I play with my kid

4 paper signatures (stacks of sheets folded in half) in a neatish pile. The spines have been sewn with red thread. One is wonky because I didn't measure shit

The same four signatures clamped between two pieces of plywood from some project I abandoned nearly ten years ago.

The spine of the signatures have been slathered with pva glue

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 26/12/2025

I always feel like I suck at Zachtronics games, but I guess I did ok on this rice cooker level :D

High score screen from the 'Rice Cooker' level from Kaizen: A Factory Story

The 'cost' high score is showing as better than any other displayed on the global score histogram

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 08/12/2025

I'd forgotten, but for a while I was posting pics like this where people post results of opening boxes of magic cards on discord 😂

Contents of a biscuit box. Decent mid tier biscuits like choc chip cookies and custard creams. Couple of chocolate digestives. Jammy dodgers with centers is nice, but no penguins or other bars so disappointing over all

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 04/12/2025

Your last saved meme is your moral philosophy (accurate, also thanks @quest64official.bsky.social )

Npc from Quest 64 saying "What do you do for a living" and the protagonist (Brian) replying "I do my best"

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 18/11/2025

QTP with your first Pokémon game and starter! I got blue very early, because I found a US import copy. It was super cheap - £20 instead of the standard 30 (which the copy of red next to it was priced at!) I'd long since finished the game before it really hit big here, which felt weird

Box art for Pokémon Blue on gameboy. It is the US version, and this is not a mistake despite living in the UK

Concept art for charmander in Ken Sugimori's style. Honestly I wish he says still setting the style like this, it's so unique with it's watercolour look, and all colours highlighting to white

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 16/10/2025

Someone should take away my ability to write template code in C++ Although given how much effort this took to write, perhaps they already did (thanks to this blog post for how to approach this : akrzemi1.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/a... the author Andrzej Krzemieński doesn't seem to be on here)

$Screenshot of some c++ code which says the following (with apologies to screen reader users): template<typename U, std::enable_if_t<std::is_same_v<U, std::decay_t<L>> && std::is_default_constructible_v<L>, int> = 0 > AssetLibrary() : loader() {}$

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 12/10/2025

Slightly late #ScreenshotSaturday of my tricky burger building game Lunch Rush is out, it tickles that retro puzzle itch, and you can play in your browser for free here sireel.itch.io/lunch-rush

A screenshot from a falling blocks type puzzle game showing burger ingredients. A burger has been assembled, without a patty (oops)

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 01/10/2025

Everyone can just find the game for themselves, right?

Two buttons meme

Button 1: "promote the game I just released"
Button 2:"play silksong"

Panel two is a man looking nervous and sweating

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 01/10/2025

Might fuck around and release my new game today, who knows

a puzzle game in progress. Various burger ingredients are arranged on a board, with one pile about to become a complete burger. The UI shows the level, score, and next ingredient to appear on the board

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 30/09/2025

What's fun is the original function (pictured) is domain clamped. It can't come out wrong, the sinf should produce things in [0,1]. It turns out sinf(M_PI) is a small negative number. I'm not sure if that's because SDL's pi is poorly chosen, or any of a dozen other reasons - it doesn't matter

$Screenshot of a small lambda function. It reads: auto yMap = [&](float t) { t = clamp(0, 1, t); return sinf(t * M_PI) * config.tileHeight * 0.3f; }; Sorry if you use a screen reader and it sounds awful reading code!$

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 24/09/2025

My next game is finally shippable, but I'm staring at the draft of the itch page thinking something's missing. It doesn't help that I know the core of the game is fundamentally tricky in a way which will put most people off giving it more than a cursory try. ↓ Anyone want to playtest this? ↓

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 30/08/2025

"I doing big well!" The joy of doing big well can be yours too sireel.itch.io/breakfast-game

My two year old, playing breakfast game at my extremely disorganised desk.

His score is obscured, but it's probably in the millions

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 27/08/2025

Game devs post your first shipped game and your latest shipped game. I don't care that the latest wasn't a commercial release, I'm proud of it. Play in your browser here for free: sireel.itch.io/breakfast-game

Smart As... For psvita. It shows the cover of the box with the title text, depicting a clean stylised planet covered in various knick knacks, eg pawns, jigsaw pieces, a camera. In the background there is a bar chart

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 19/08/2025

After weeks of procrastination, I finally finished the title logo for my new game. No I will not make it good later. Making it exist was more than enough for me.

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 16/08/2025

I fixed a stupid bug and wrote a little thread about tracking it down. I also realised that I've not posted a single video of the new game's gameplay so I thought I'd fix that this #ScreenshotSaturday

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 16/08/2025

Of course. An uninitialised screen pointer. Something that should have failed 99% of the time somehow worked 95%+ of the time. It must have been initialised to zero most of the time, as a junk value should segfault in the native build. Despite testing it in release mode, it never once hit

$C++ source code reading: bool landscape{ true }; SDL_Texture* screen; SDL_Rect gameTarget; void updateTarget(SDL_Renderer* renderer); bool gameTargetDirty{ true }; int windowX{}, windowY{};$

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 16/08/2025

I'm building with emscripten, so it's literally as easy as adding the standard gcc debug flag -g. This told me my crash location was... my render function? Specifically binding the back buffer I use for making a fixed screen resolution. But the code looks fine. Best to check carefully though

$C++ source code reading (the screenshot is truncated horizontally, so you get the extra info in here): // Setup backbuffer target if (screen == nullptr) { if (landscape) screen = SDL_CreateTexture(renderer, SDL_PIXELFORMAT_ARGB8888, SDL_TEXTUREACCESS_TARGET, 480, 270); else screen = SDL_CreateTexture(renderer, SDL_PIXELFORMAT_ARGB8888, SDL_TEXTUREACCESS_TARGET, 270, 480); SDL_SetTextureBlendMode(screen, SDL_BLENDMODE_BLEND); ASSERT(screen != nullptr); } SDL_SetRenderTarget(renderer, screen);$

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 16/08/2025

The callstack in the web build was not helpful. And I knew from experience even if I had a stack, it might not answer the problem without debugging. At this point I hadn't realised it was first run only, so I wrote a quick and dirty input fuzzer to run in the compiled version

$Screenshot of C++ source code, it reads: #if FUZZ static float delay = 0.25f; delay -= Delta; if (delay < 0) { SDL_Event e; e.type = SDL_KEYDOWN; e.key.repeat = false; e.key.keysym.sym = (rand() & 1) ? SDLK_LCTRL : SDLK_RCTRL; gameflow->handleInputEvent(&e); } #endif$

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Jameson Thatcher @sireel.itch.io · 12/08/2025

Showed my eight year old Fusion 2 as an easy on ramp to game dev He's abandoned three projects already, I couldn't be more proud

Photo of a boy with long blond hair say at a desk, looking at fusion 2's event editor. There is about half a screen of events on show.

The desk is a mess, covered in my assorted crap. A gameboy advance in a yellow case. Half a packet of bourbon cream biscuits. A box of magic the gathering cards. A giant novelty d20 my friend 3d printed for me. The first pair of socks my son wore. You get the idea.

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